A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. I'm now a co-founder of The Nerve, set up a year ago by five women journalists from the Guardian and Observer. This is my personal newsletter.

How to Survive the Broligarchy is a reader-supported publication. Please sign up for free or if you can afford to, pay to support my work. With thanks, Carole

I'm going to start with a list of a few headlines of the last two weeks:

• October 12: Prime Minister Andy Burnham acknowledges that there is "clear" evidence that showed Russia interfered in the Brexit vote.

• October 16: Elon Musk asked Donald Trump to slow down Ukraine's connection to Starlink. This resulted in the Ukrainian army's ability to warn civilians of incoming missile strikes.

• October 16: Facebook employees reveal the company boosted social media posts of Flavio Bolsonaro ahead of this week's election.

• October 21: Facebook is fined $25bn over the Cambridge Analytica data breach and deceiving users over data privacy.

Spot the connection?

All of these headlines directly map onto a series of events that first came under scrutiny almost exactly a decade ago. Next month marks the ten-year anniversary of Donald Trump's election to the US presidency but also the first detectable rumblings of the tectonic plates that underpin our world: plates which like the San Andreas fault, run deep through the heart of Silicon Valley.

Ten years on, it's all out in the open: credible evidence of one US social media platform attempting to tip an election in one of the world's most important economies while another US tech mogul joins forces with Donald Trump to help Vladimir Putin kill Ukrainian civilians, while the UK prime minister admits that Putin was also behind an attack on the referendum that took Britain out of Europe and made both weaker.

All of which connects back to the original tech scandal, one that some people - Mark Zuckerberg, of course, among them - still like to characterise as a conspiracy theory. Kudos to the New Mexico attorney general for insisting on trying to simply uphold the law.

It's my own ten year anniversary too. Because it was the election of Donald Trump and the phenomenon that had just been christened "fake news" that kicked off that investigation. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal has always been a misleading name in some ways because it encompassed all of the above: abuse of personal data, tech platforms enabling invisible political manipulation and hostile state actors taking advantage of it all.

To be clear, this isn't an "I told you so" moment. It's an "I'm still telling you so." And, the reason for that is another date and news story that has to be added to the list:

• October 22: The UK government issues "preparedness advice" warning citizens to stockpile essentials in the event of cyber attacks or supply chain disruption.

British citizens are being told to invest in wind-up radios and power banks and to keep water and food in stock.

All of these headlines have caught me by surprise to some degree. I've been surprised that the authorities are actually acting. That after a decade of official government denials and gaslighting, Andy Burnham casually admitted on a podcast the words that no UK government minister has ever said. Chatting away on the Rest of Politics, he mentioned that he'd asked officials about Russian interference in Brexit and had been informed in no uncertain terms that there was.

He just came right out and said it! As if the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, hadn't personally buried parliament's intelligence committee's Russia Report right before the crucial 2019 general election that gave him his hard Brexit mandate. As if, Johnson's first act on winning wasn't to attend a party thrown his honour by the son of a former FSB spy. As if, Nigel Farage's close friend and political ally, Nathan Gill, wasn't sentenced to ten and a half years for accepting Russian bribes earlier this year.

Russian interference has been the elephant in a room for a decade and anyone who investigated it - a tiny handful of journalists - were conspiracy-loving nuts. Even in America, where the state did step up and act, the "Russia hoax" had traction on both the right and the mainstream. The FBI and Congress spent years uncovering Russia's systematic attack on the 2016 election, but journalists covering Trump's relationship with Putin were treated with suspicion. Even the extensive and painstaking reports by the FBI and Senate Intelligence Committee were brushed under the carpet by the normie editors of normie publications who found it too James Bond for their taste.

Burnham's words were a surprise, then. As was the New Mexico court that fined Meta $25bn. I've seen Facebook pay billions to settle every case that's come its way and there have been many. I've watched its senior executives evade scrutiny and consequences for a decade so it's genuinely a shock when something actually lands.

It's a record-breaking fine and the judgment details systematic deception at the company over years, citing internal emails that involved the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg in a consistent pattern of behaviour in which users - and journalists and investors - were repeatedly lied to.

It's important not just because it's the original sin - the harvesting of our personal data underpins Silicon Valley's surveillance economy and therefore its power - but because everything we are witnessing today with AI is a direct descendant of this scandal, or more precisely, the lack of consequences these tech executives faced in the wake of this scandal. It created an environment of impunity that infects everything we see happening today, a playbook that Sam Altman, to name just one out-of-control tech bro, has taken to his heart.

But perhaps most surprisingly of all, the British government has finally woken from its slumber and issued the same warning to its citizens that the governments of Scandinavia, the Baltics, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, Belgium and the EU did to theirs several years ago.

A confession: I've been a covert prepper since a conversation with an Irish open-source researcher, Gavin Sheridan, two years ago. It was at the time Russian spy ships that were circling Britain and Ireland and the anchor of a shadow fleet tanker had "accidentally" severed a cable between Finland and Estonia.

What's the worst thing that could happen if they did succeed in cutting the cables between Britain and America, I asked Gavin. He thought for a moment "Well, I guess the first thing would happen would be the total collapse of the global economy," he said cheerfully. I told him I was thinking of buying a wind-up radio. I'd contemplated the idea of not knowing what was happening but at the same time I didn't want to become one of those people US cable networks make documentaries about.

"I've got two!" Gavin said. "One for me and one for my parents." When I saw him this summer he told me that he'd now got a Starlink antenna stashed away in his cupboard. Another of my friends, a world-renowned European tech expert, told me a year and a half ago that she keeps cash in the house and the tank of her car full. I would never have admitted publicly that I followed suit with the cash or that after European intelligence chiefs warned of an imminent attack by Russia this September, I got some water containers in too. It would have been much too embarrassing. And yet here we are with an extensive list the UK government has just put out - blankets, torches, three days' supply of food, a power bank - it makes my own efforts look frankly pathetic.

But how to process that? The actual UK government is now more alarmist than me, a noted conspiracy theorist/truth-telling Cassandra/delete as applicable. What the actual…?

And yet. There's still not a joining of the dots. And that's why I put that list at the top of this newsletter. There's still a widespread failure to understand how interconnected this all is. How it's not a coincidence that both Trump and Elon Musk have joined forces with Putin to facilitate his attacks on Ukraine. How Meta, in the week a record-breaking Cambridge Analytica-related fine is handed down, is accused of trying to tip the election in Bolsonaro's favour (the Brazilian courts - after the European Union - have been one of the most effective checks on Silicon Valley's power. )

This is all the same story.

Britain believes it's physically and psychically apart from Europe, that Russia is a long way away and that although Elon Musk has incited riots in the UK and backed the efforts of our most right-wing political party, Restore, we're somehow immune from his influence.

It's why it's always something of a relief to visit countries that understand these threats more viscerally than we in Britain do. This week, I was in Germany to speak at Munich Media Days, a convention for publishers grappling with the many questions that AI has thrown up for them. In Bavaria, Russia feels that much closer than it does in Britain - because it is. And yet it also feels safer: because people's understanding of the issues seems so much keener, the subject so much more urgent. This is a nation that understands a genocidal dictator. Hitler's Eagles Nest retreat, less than 100 miles from Munich, was torched a day after I left (no connection).

Two Turkish citizens were arrested in Germany this month for allegedly setting fire to a Starlink station in Poland. It's yet another act of presumed sabotage by Russia on the European mainland but, in the week that Musk asked Trump to slow down Starlink and he complied, it's a stark reminder of how we cannot depend on US technology.

That's what this month must now bring home to us all. That we simply cannot trust US technology companies. It's absurd to put any aspect of national security in Elon Musk's hands. The UK government has a $40m contract with Starlink as do Poland, Germany and Estonia.

In Europe, we have to rapidly prioritise alternatives. And in Britain, we have to accept that joining a European technology and security union is our best and only bet. And to do that, we have to finally operate in a reality-based news environment in which we acknowledge the Brexit elephants, something which Andy Burnham, kudos to him, seems determined to do.

But we also have to reckon with the fact that all those stories about Trump and Putin from a decade ago? They didn't go far enough. Trump is a Russian asset. The how and why of that no longer matters. You know the saying: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Trump acts like a Russian asset and talks like a Russian asset. He is a Russian asset. Putin is one of the only world leaders he's never fallen out with.

If there were any justice in the world, there'd be a Truth and Reality Commission that would oversee a series of apologies. I hereby nominate Hillary Clinton to be its first recipient: she was bang on the money from the start only no-one believed her because: misogyny. (Rocketfuelled by Russia's Internet Research Agency and my old friends: Cambridge Analytica.) What goes around comes around.

There's another elephant in the room: Vlad's friends in the UK. But I'm going to leave it here with one of the worst example of journalistic malpractice I've ever seen. BBC Newsnight used BBC News's flagship late-night news programme. It's now a glorified podcast show with a revolving roster of rent-a-pundits. Even so, this is a new low. On the day after the news of Burnham's pronouncement on Russian interference in Brexit broke, it opted to invite "Former Putin spokesperson Sergei Markov" to throw light on the subject. I'm screenshotting rather than posting the video because it's simply too dumb to bear re-watching.

It was an absurd booking not least because Markov never was Putin's spokesman. But he's still a proven liar who's made a career of defending a genocidal dictator. And, that, in a nutshell is part of the reason that it's taken ten years to get us to a point where a UK prime minister is finally prepared to acknowledge the bleedingly obvious.

Take care. And buy a wind-up radio.

Thank you, as ever, for reading & especially to those who pay to support my work xx

I was going to headline this piece, "Hillary was right" but I'll save that for another day. Here instead is a snap of us chitchatting about Putin and other mutual acquaintances at the world's weirdest event. Also: congrats to Maria Ressa, on the right, on the publication of her essential new book, The Fight Back: A Citizen's Guide to Standing up to Dictators. Maria knows. The first dictator of the title - Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines' former president - is heading to The Hague next month to stand trial for crimes against humanity, an incredible feat in which she played no small part. We've yet to get the second dictator, Zuck, but there's still time. Read all about that in our conversation with historian Yuval Noah Hariri in the Nerve here.)

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. I'm now a co-founder of The Nerve, set up a year ago by five women journalists from the Guardian and Observer. This is my personal newsletter.

Thank you, as ever, for your support. It's incredibly meaningful.

Some years ago, I co-wrote a commissioned pilot for a TV series that centred around a bunch of unlikely female spies. It was based on a real story about how parliament's intelligence committee told MI5 they needed to get with the programme and stop recruiting from public schools and Oxbridge and put ads on places like Mumsnet.

It didn't get picked up for broadcast but my friend, Louise Crowe, and I had a blast writing it and this morning, I found myself thinking, as I often have, about our tagline for the show: "There's no-one more invisible than a middle aged woman."

I wrote it before I turned myself into an investigative journalist, before I'd begun meeting spies or ex-spies and before my life began to resemble an actual episode from the series. But I was more right than I knew. Invisibility is a handy quality for both spies and journalists. It's perhaps my only superpower. I'm not actually invisible but as a middle-aged female journalist, I might as well be. Being serially underestimated is how I got all my best stories. I like to chat. I'm not an arse. And, if I don't look like an ambitious young man hungry for his next scoop, it's because I'm not.

In Britain, it's meant that I exist in a strange shadow world. For a decade, as well as reporting out my stories in the Guardian and Observer, I've been a power user of social media. It's where I've gathered evidence, found allies and storytold what was happening in real time. My tweets and Bluesky posts and now Substack newsletter get huge traction and while Twitter may not be the force it once was, my tweets routinely go viral.

But I'm also invisible. In America, I've regularly appeared on some of the US's biggest shows - Jon Stewart! - but as far as the mainstream UK media landscape is concerned, I don't actually exist. That suits me in many ways. I don't want to play the media game, and, as the ex-editor of the Sun, kindly pointed out on Friday, I don't hunt with the pack.

(Thank you, David, it takes a non-pack follower to know one.)

But it does lead to some wtf moments. The man who sued me in the High Court is back in the news.

Emily Lawford at the New Statesman revealed on Friday that Arron Banks had paid for private intelligence agents to spy on a Sunday Times journalist who's been investigating Nigel Farage's finances. A spate of articles followed over the weekend including one in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times on the threat to free speech this rightly poses. But what unites them all (apart from a Substack by the ex-editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber) is that all these articles treated Banks - the funder of Nigel Farage's Brexit campaign - as if he was a brand new character to appear on the national stage not someone who has actively sought to silence and intimidate not just journalists but government officials too.

Quite apart from what spending years and hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to bankrupt me and end my career, he also spied on journalists, spied on the UK's official data regulator, threatened parliament's intelligence and security committee, the Information Commission, Netflix and the Electoral Commission after it referred him to the police.

He reported me to the police too, an incident considered so serious by the Guardian's lawyer that I was given a full briefing on what I should do in the event of an arrest.

But there's nobody as invisible as a middle-aged woman. I woke up to this message from a friend.

The problem with this wilful denial goes way beyond me. It's not me who's being gaslit here, it's the Great British public. Anyone who's followed any part of this story knows about Banks. They know, too, that the questions about Farage's funding haven't come out of nowhere.

And they know that these questions have been ignored by our overwhelmingly right-wing print media and, as a consequence of that, the BBC. What's so dislocating is that we're all living in at least two parallel information spheres simultaneously.

There's the news that a man or woman in a suit will read from a script on a network broadcast news programme, a format that hasn't changed in half a century. And then there's all the other news that you can see with your eyes and ears on every other platform you visit, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Substack.

The fact is that social media is mainstream media now. A larger percentage of people now get their news from social media than they do from legacy outlets, according to latest Reuters Institute report. And - as we saw with Gaza - minimising or denying something that people know to be true creates blowback: an ongoing erosion of trust.

This wilful denial of the long, dark hinterland of this story isn't doing a disservice to me, it's doing a disservice to the facts, to readers, to anyone with eyes and ears. Two weeks ago, I wrote a long piece for the Nerve about the UK media's "decade of denial" about who Nigel Farage is and - most especially - where his money comes from, but it only scratched the surface.

But now Arron Banks is back. He's re-inserted himself into the story and it creates a massive headache for the pack. They're going to continue to pretend this has nothing to do with Brexit? Really? That the questions about Farage's finances have sprung from terra incognita? Well, they can. But no-one will believe them.

The way that this story is playing out is just one more fascinating data point about the dysfunction of a small island where the man at the centre of it all is engaged in an election that didn't need to happen where his main opponent is a bin.*

*Trashcan for the Americans. But one from a galaxy far away.

I began with a fictional spy caper and, given this is a rather woolly storytelling newsletter today, I'll end with a true crime recommendation.

For months, Netflix has been insistently suggesting that I should watch "Should I Marry a Murderer?" And, while it's not inaccurate to say that I do sometimes fall down the algorithmic pathway best described as trashy true crime, I'd already decided this was a trashy true crime title too far and scrolled on.

There's a rule of thumb which says that if a headline is a question, the answer is usually "no". And so with true crime Netflix shows. Should you marry a murderer? No, hen. Also this was a British true crime show (Scottish, actually, hence "hen" which translates as "dear" or perhaps "babe"). And British true crime is so much less lurid as the American variety where living next door to Mormon serial killing cult leader seems to be par for the course. That happens less often in Surrey.

Anyway, a week or so ago in need of some brain numbing, I succumbed, watched all three episodes and - in an unexpected plot twist - found myself over-identifying with the main character. No, I didn't nearly marry a murderer. Though I do have a very colourful tale of a near-brush with a serial killer. (I once hitched a lift with Fred West*.)

(*He killed female hitchhikers, if you're wondering, but only after chaining them up in his basement and torturing them with his wife, Rosemary. )

But the over-identification is because the main character - a seemingly smart and sensible pathologist called Caroline Muirhead - is seen cracking up over the three episodes after she shops her fiancé to the police. He proposes to her and shortly afterwards confesses that he killed a cyclist and then buried the body. She does the right thing and goes to the police who eventually manage to charge him and make him stand trial.

But on the day Muirhead was meant to be in court giving evidence against him, she ends up in a Highland loch smashed off her face on some combination of wine, vodka and class As and then steals a tractor. The last we see of her is on the run in the stolen tractor, a police helicopter circling overhead. She's later arrested for contempt of court and spends two days in prison.

Go, Caroline! As acts of self-sabotage go, I couldn't help but envy her. It was splashy and dramatic and she filmed the whole thing. She simply couldn't face going into court and giving evidence, felt that she'd been completely let down by the authorities, and cracked under the strain.

She had tried to do the right thing - reporting her boyfriend to the police and leading detectives to the body - and the police had arrested him and his brother. But then they let them go. Worse, detectives on two separate occasions revealed her role in shopping them to the authorities.

She reasoned - I think correctly - that she and her family were in danger. The police refused to provide any protection. And for months, the killers remained free and at large as the police searched for the body. Muirhead ends up going back to the boyfriend though continues to gather evidence including covertly taping their conversations.

In short, she tried to do the right thing and was hung out to dry by the authorities. Blowing herself up and undergoing what appears to be a psychotic break struck me as a completely rational response to the circumstances.

When the police commissioner is asked why they didn't provide any support or protection for her, he responds by saying she was a highly educated doctor and should have known how to access support through official channels. He adds that she hadn't even been with her boyfriend that long.

It's a fascinating study in misogyny. Her evidence put two murderers behind bars and returned the body of a beloved father to his family. But her invisibility to the authorities, the very body that was meant to protect her, is what screwed with her head. She's taken herself off social media, did no publicity for the series, and has made unsuccessful attempts to hold the police to account for her actions.

My crack-up was quieter than Caroline Muirhead's and I regret that. I took myself off social media, out of the public eye and had my breakdown in private. I didn't have Muirhead's sense of drama and I knew I wouldn't end up in prison, just bankrupt and homeless, but I was also desperate and it also made me sick.

And a Netflix trashy true crime show about a Scottish murder is the closest I've come to having my experience reflected back at me. Muirhead was angrier with the police than she was with the murderer. I understood that too. The Guardian's failure to support me as it ran ads about speaking truth to power is what screwed with my head. The world is upside down when Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times has proved itself to be a better defender of journalistic values than Britain's famously progressive news organisation but it is what it is.

But there's no Netflix ending. The only person put on trial was me. The invisibility continues and that's not my problem any more - I've walked through fire and I no longer care - it's everyone else who is at risk. Everyone on this small dysfunctional island in the North Atlantic where we're spending our summer watching the possible next prime minister thrashing it out in a seaside resort against a man with a bin on his head while his political ally puts spies onto the journalists investigating him. This is the true crime drama we deserve, an absurd, ridiculous pantomime that's actually a morality tale for our time.

Thank you so much to everyone who subscribes and supports me, and has supported me, for years. xx

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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On Friday, news broke that Peter Thiel's secret conference, Dialog, has been kicked out of Ireland. It was only two weeks after it was revealed that he had a secret conference. That exploded across the internet when hackers accessed the website's code and leaked the guest list.

The exposé made headlines across the world not least in Ireland where the Powerscourt Hotel & Spa in County Wicklow was revealed to be the venue for this year's gathering. That was, until news broke on Friday that the hotel had cancelled the booking (not a small decision: 200 rooms over three nights in peak season is a not inconsiderable hole in anyone's balance sheet).

Who doesn't love a peasant's revolt? And it wasn't even the peasants who revolted. The owners of the Powerscourt Estate who own the land where the event was scheduled to take place had threatened legal action against their tenants, the hotel. It was actually a bunch of nepo babies what did it (heirs to the Slazenger fortune).

Here's a top tip for any other owners of a military surveillance firm implicated in the Gaza genocide looking for a quiet spot for some secret plotting, maybe don't pick Ireland, the most reflexively pro-Palestine country in Europe? These people understand an occupation.

I don't want to spoil anybody's fun and as excited as I was to see the leaked list of names, there was arguably less to this story than meets the eye.

Thiel did co-found the conference but his involvement with it seems at best inconsistent. Marietje Schaake, the author of the excellent The Tech Coup, attended in 2019, found it unremarkable and had no idea of Thiel's involvement. That's only one data point but the article I link to, by researcher Dave Troy, is the best analysis I've seen. It describes it as "the top of the funnel", an outer entry point into the Thielverse. There's even an email in the Epstein files from one of his flunkies complaining about how the conference keeps using his name to flog tickets when he doesn't actually attend.

But what if I told you there is a secret masters-of-the-universe conference that Thiel helps fund, serves as a director of, and stacks with some of his closest business partners and allies?

A conference that, unlike Dialog, features some of the most important decision makers from the worlds of defence, intelligence, finance and politics?

And that this year's attendees included the head of MI6, the Secretary General of NATO, a President (Finland), a brace of finance ministers, the head of French intelligence, a King and Queen (the Netherlands) Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the chair of Goldman Sachs, the CEO of Deutsche Bank and the President of the European Investment Bank?

Would you believe me? Or does this feel like a conspiracy theory too far?

The fact is that it should be. But, that's just the highlights of the guest list this year. And the conference isn't even secret, it's just Peter Thiel's connection to it that or at least has gone almost entirely under the radar.

But if you want to obsess about a conference where Thiel pulls the strings with an Epstein-adjacent elite - more on this below - this is it.

This isn't some TED-lite conference, it's one of the consequential military and intelligence gatherings on the planet: the Bilderberg group. And Thiel is at the heart of it.

If even the name sounds like a conspiracy theory, it's because it is. Bilderberg is the subject of any number of confected conspiracies but - here's the kicker - it is also an actual conference which takes place once a year in actual hotels around the world and attracts vanishingly little attention. For years, it wouldn't even acknowledge its own existence, but it now publishes an attendee list and a list of topics, though not until after the event. This year's meeting included discussions on the 'Future of Warfare' and 'The West'.

Not that you'd know this because Bilderberg is reported almost nowhere, a fact that is maybe not beside the point, if you read on. It allows no journalists (in a journalistic capacity, major caveat below), holds no press conferences, and delivers no headlines.

This was the list that was leaked ahead of this year's event:

An important caveat: I am casting no aspersion on anyone on the list. If I was invited to come and hang out with Peter Thiel and the head of MI6 plus the odd king, queen and president, I'd be there like a shot. And I'm an acquaintance and fan of the journalist and writer, Anne Applebaum, who's on the list. (If you haven't read her Autocracy Inc, do.)

But the reason I went digging when I saw this cross my social media feed back in April is because I spotted a common theme among the names that didn't seem accidental.

It wasn't just Peter Thiel's name that popped out but multiple other significant members of the Thielverse. The first of these is pretty obvious: Thiel's Palantir co-founder, Alex Karp. Then there's Brian Schmipf, CEO of Anduril Industries, an autonomous weapons firm in which Thiel's Founders Fund had been an early investor and who partners with Palantir in US military programme Titan.

Also on the list: Michael Kratsios, a former principal at Thiel Capital then Clarium Capital (also owned by Thiel). He's now Trump's senior advisor on Science and Technology.

Then there's Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (which has just bought the UK's Daily Telegraph). Döpfner's son, Moritz, went to work for Thiel who then invested into his business. And finally, Uwe Horstmann, CEO of STARK Industries, an autonomous attack drone company that Thiel and Döpfner co-invested in. They have just won a contract with the German government worth almost €1 billion.

That's a whole lot of Thiel in a small, highly influential conference involving senior military, intelligence and defence people. Almost five per cent of attendees have direct business and financial relationships with Thiel.

It's worth noting that the published list differs to the pre-leaked one with regards to one name - Peter Thiel. He was a no-show which is both an aberration and a question. He did attend in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

And it's also just the tip of the iceberg. Because who controls, owns and funds, Bilderberg?

Well, let's start with the guests and who chooses them.

Helpfully, Bilderberg's website has a FAQ section that covers this:

The guest list is "curated by the Steering Committee". And who's on the Steering Committee? Peter Thiel. He's one of the longest serving members, now in his 18th year. Alex Karp is also on the committee.

And who sits on the board of the organisation behind Bilderberg? Peter Thiel. He's one of nine directors of American Friends of Bilderberg, the non-profit that sits behind the conference. Alex Karp is also on the board of directors. Between them, they control nearly 1/4 of its votes.

Most crucially of all, who funds Bilderberg? Yep. Right again Peter Thiel.

The American Friends of Bilderberg files financial statements and the last set of filings show that Thiel is its biggest donor by far. In 2025, he gave $1m - twice as much as the next donor - who just happens to be his Palantir co-founder, Alex Karp. Karp's donation is matched by ex-Google chair and now defence tech investor, Eric Schmidt (via his entity Big Hen Group). Schmidt is also a director of Bilderberg and has co-invested in various companies with Thiel including America's Frontier Fund, a "non-profit" set up to lobby government to fund more chip development.

Who pays the piper calls the tune. And going back over the last several years, Thiel is by far the biggest bankroller of Bilderberg.

When and how did Peter Thiel get involved with Bilderberg? He attended his first conference in 2007 and according to reports that's when he was "co-opted" onto the steering committee in 2008. It's worth noting here that his then startup, Palantir, had just received funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture fund.

It was the early days of the rise of Silicon Valley, the financial crash had rocked the world, and Thiel was the coming tech bro at the intersection of technology, defence and surveillance.

But what's fascinating going back through the Friends of Bilderberg's filings is that for years, Peter Thiel and Henry Kissinger sat alongside each other as directors and donors.

This one is from 2022 when Kissinger was still alive and involved. Kissinger donated $5k. Thiel gave $500k, which was twice as much as the next biggest donation.

Thiel and Karp's donations are structured as personal payments. But then it is personal: who stands to benefit commercially from access to information from the US, UK and Europe's most senior military and intelligence officials? Their company, Palantir. Not to mention Thiel's other investments in Anduril and STARK and his early stage investment funds.

I wish I could say that Thiel's involvement is the most shocking thing about Bilderberg. But I haven't even got onto the Epstein of it. And before that, I'll share a couple of other questions from the FAQ section.

Let's consider this. No "reporting journalists" are allowed. But select journalists do so "a titre personnel". I love the lapse into French here. If that's not a phrase you've ever heard, you're not alone, because it's not a phrase that anyone ever uses.

And why "so little media coverage"? Because of a "lack of interest"? Really? Well, if that was ever true, it's certainly not now.

But here's the kicker. Alongside Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Eric Schmidt and Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) on the board of the Friends of Bilderberg, the organisation behind the organisation, the one that funds and controls it, is…a journalist. Actually, the editor-in-chief of one of the most important financial news organisations in the world, Bloomberg. The man who has the job of reporting on these men and their companies is a co-director with them in American Friends of Bilderberg.

(Stacey Abrams, the US politician and voting rights activist is another extremely odd name on that list.)

Now, John Micklethwait seems like a perfectly nice man. I've met him and he's an affable Brit who happens to be married to the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. But..a director of Bilderberg? Alongside the Silicon Valley titans his organisation reports on? Isn't that the very definition of a conflict of interest?

And it turns out he's not the only journalist centrally involved with the organisation. The Economist, I discover, has a long history at Bilderberg and Micklethwait appears to have inherited the role from when he was editor-in-chief for the Economist. And he inherited it from another former Economist editor-in-chief, Andrew Knight, who was on Bilderberg's steering committee for years.

Rupert Murdoch poached Knight and he eventually became chair of News International's board and was seen as Murdoch's successor.

But it's in the UK filings of its associated UK entity, the Bilderberg Association, that there's another jawdropper.

The two directors of it - who both also sit on the Bilderberg steering committee - are Zanny Minton Beddoes (registered under her full name, Susan, here), the editor-in-chief of the Economist, and Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6.

Maybe I'm naive, but is anyone else surprised by this? Pointing out the relationships between individuals in the media, politics, tech and power is not one of my top career-advancing skills.

But really? Tag teaming with the former head of MI6 as the legal director of the UK entity of a semi-secret talking shop that Peter Thiel funds and co-controls? And which your readers know nothing about? How, exactly, does that work?

The conference is held on 'Chatham House rules', nothing can be attributed to named people. And from what I can see neither the Economist or Bloomberg have ever reported on Bilderberg. In fact, there's very little coverage anywhere though other news outlets occasionally run snarky articles like this one from the Guardian earlier this year. It calls it "the intellectual engine room of Nato" and notes "it's a mystery why the press fails to talk about it."

The journalist, Charlie Skelton, a long-time Bilderberg watcher, describes the event a Nato talking shop plus a big dose of "crony-capitalism" - his words.

"Big business lobbying in private is Bilderberg's speciality and this secretive mix of the private and the public sectors fits perfectly with Trump's brand of crony-capitalism."

But of course, it's not just Trump's. Palantir's largest client is the US government. Its second largest client is the UK government. Capitalists have to capitalise and maybe it's just dumb of me not to realise that the editors of the some of the world's most influential news organisations would be part of the process.

But also: I don't think they should be. Access journalism is bad journalism. End of.

There are many fine and great journalists and editors at both the Economist and Bloomberg and none of this is intended as any slight on them. But what this smacks of is a lost era in which news organisations could operate on command-and-control lines with the same lack of transparency as the people they report on. But in an age of ever diminishing trust in the news media, this just won't wash any more.

Another snippet from Charlie Skelton's piece:

Quite why the press fails so spectacularly to talk about Bilderberg, to answer his question, is because…it turns out the press is Bilderberg.

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The first time I heard or read about Bilderberg was a long read in the Guardian magazine many many years ago by the arch comedic writer, Jon Ronson, extracted from his book, Them.

He writes it as a comedy caper - Ronson, if you're not familiar, is Louis Therouxish in his approach (neither will mind the comparison because it's one that they've both made). And, in the piece, he has a guide to the event 'Big Jim'. At the time - 1991 - Bilderberg was still in its hyper-secretive phase refusing to even acknowledge its meetings. Ronson was working off rumours about a secret cabal, "lizard people" and how captains of industry and presidents would meet on an annual basis to carve up the world order.

Loitering in Portugal, he spots David Rockefeller, Umberto Agnelli, Henry Kissinger, Conrad Black, the President of the World Bank, a friend of Bill Clinton's and then clocks a passing bus.

It's played for jokes though after researching this newsletter, it strikes me he may not be wrong about the Pulitzers. But the presence of Peter Mandelson shouldn't be a shock because Bilderberg may be the most Peter Mandelson event that's ever existed.

It goes without saying this was not Peter Mandelson's only rodeo. He also attended in 1999, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. But then it also goes without saying that many Epstein-adjacent figures have attended over the years, including Henry Kissinger.

Most notably, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, who's all over the files and against whom some of the most serious allegations have been made.

Barak isn't just a former Israeli PM, he's served at the highest levels of the IDF including as the head of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate and chief of staff. And he is also a business partner of both Epstein and Thiel. They co-invested in Carbyne, an Israeli surveillance firm.

Barak introduced the company to Epstein and Epstein introduced Barak to Thiel. Nor was Barak some sort of casual Bilderbergite. He's another Mandelson. Barak's attendance is not at the level of a Thiel but he is a frequent and regular invitee at the conference attending in 2000, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2019.

Bilderberg is a small conference with a limited number of guests, just 130 in 2026. There are some senior politicians who went once - Gordon Brown, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel - but very few who've attended at anything like the level of Mandelson or Barak, let alone a Thiel.

It's notable that both Mandelson and Barak were in Epstein's network, but what Bilderberg highlights is how deeply entrenched they were in Thiel's too.

If this all feels like a conspiracy too far, well remember that Epstein was just another conspiracy theory until thousands of documents revealed it was actually conspiracy fact.

And if there's one thing we learned from Watergate: follow the money.

Cash is cash. Who pays the piper, calls the tune. And in the case of Bilderberg, that's Peter Thiel

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The problem with Bilderberg is that it's always attracted conspiracy-minded nutters.

I enjoyed stumbling across this earlier. Andrew Neil - who called me a "crazy cat lady" in a late night tweet while the BBC's most senior political presenter - being grilled on the wisdom of inviting an actual conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, onto his show to "debate" whether Bilderberg is a conspiracy.

It's also sadly inevitable that many of the conspiracies about Bilderberg are virulently anti-semitic. It goes with the 'secret rulers of the world' narrative. That's a narrative that attracts anti-semites like moths to the proverbial flame.

Conspiracy theories are baseless, evidence-less conjectures based on nativist pseudo evidence.

It's why, in this newsletter, I link to sources and like to include screenshots. But I also find it hard to ignore the subject of Israel in relation to Bilderberg.

Because this is Thiel's world. And Thiel's views on Israel are unignorable.

Thiel isn't some neutral tech vendor. He's an ideologue. An idealogue who also happens to not just profit from military action but use it to accelerate its technology development through battleground situations.

I understand the point that there needs to be spaces for sensitive discussions between senior leaders to take place in private. But I'm also conscious that decisions were made in closed rooms in the last few years in which the western alliance reached a consensus on how to respond to Israel.

A closed room that, in this case, Thiel is actively helping curate.

Two other quick points: one of the very few Brits invited this year was UK justice minister David Lammy for reasons unclear though he has his own Thiel connections through his unlikely friendship with JD Vance, the US vice president. Vance is a wholly owned product of Peter Thiel, owing him both his business and political career. Lammy, as foreign secretary, is the minister who facilitated the continuing sale of arms to Israel.

Finally, a footnote on two other Brits among the very very few invited this year and last: former minister Wes Streeting and journalist and member of the House of Lords, Camilla Cavendish. They both have senior positions in the NHS, which holds one of Palantir's most sensitive contracts. Streeting was Health Minister and Cavendish is non-executive director in the Department of Health. Was that also discussed in those same closed rooms?

Who can say?

One can only hope that there's a leak ahead of next year's meeting. This is the Peter Thiel secret conference that urgently needs to be exposed to the light, starting in the Economist and Bloomberg.

I'd love to know your thoughts about any of this. There are sound survival reasons few journalists write about these media-tech-politics power dynamics so your thoughts/feedback appreciate. Thank you x

Postscript

Boris Johnson doesn't appear to have ever attended Bilderberg, which strikes me as a missed opportunity. But the Nerve's latest instalment of the Harborne Receipts features him in a story that's loosely connected to the theme of this newsletter: advanced military technology, special access to power and profiting from war. It's part 5 of our ongoing series into the cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne and you can read it here.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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Dear all,

Apologies for my absence. Thank you for bearing with me. I've been distracted by longer-term projects, the interconnected lines between global authoritarianism and Silicon Valley billionaires which underpin this newsletter.

One of those ongoing subjects is Peter Thiel and if you're subscribing to this newsletter, I suspect you understand his importance and share that interest. I've been fascinated by his latest vessel, Javier Milei's government in Argentina. The man who owns Palantir, embedded in the heart of America's ICE apparatus, its AI war machine and Britain's NHS, moved his family to Buenos Aires a couple of months ago…but what was he doing there?

I messaged Uki Goñi while pondering that, the Guardian's former Argentinian correspondent who I've swapped notes with over the years. What I appreciate about Uki is his long experience of dealing with dictators. He's not just lived through a dictatorship, he kept reporting throughout and when it comes to understanding the global far-right insurgency we are living through, I've always found him ahead of the game.

But, as we attempted to puzzle it out, Javier Milei, an "anarcho-capitalist" who campaigned with a chainsaw with which he promised to tear up the state (a pose, later appropriated by Elon Musk) solved it for us. Milei maintains a relationship with Musk and Trump and now Thiel and, posting on Twitter, he described a radical new policy that that he described as "AI MAGA".

If you want to know what the future looks like, what Peter Thiel is planning, and what we should be paying attention to, it's Argentina, Thiel's latest plaything, host organism and testing laboratory.

Two weeks later, Milei announced in the pages of the Financial Times that Argentina was inviting AI "to free itself" in Argentina. He was bringing in new legislation that would see Argentina become the first country in the world where an AI could own a company.

Peter Thiel is a believer in transhumanism. When he was interviewed the New York Times's Ross Douthat, he hesitated for much longer than you'd think possible, when he was asked whether he wanted humanity to survive.

More on Argentina below including some words from Uki, and how he connects this to Argentina's past, including its role as a refuge for Nazis who'd fled Germany.

First, a deeply connected question: what does it actually mean if corporations are more powerful than states?

I've been pondering that since I did an "interview" with Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn Williams earlier this month that blew up and made headlines across the world.

Wynn Williams is the author of the gossipy memoir of life at the top of Facebook, Careless People, and I'd been asked to interview her and the academic and writer, Tim Wu, at the Hay Festival, the daddy of all literary festivals in the green rolling hills of mid-Wales.

I wrote a short piece on what happened in the Nerve but there's more to dig into. A day before the event was due to take place, I had a prep call with Wynn Williams but she came onto the Zoom and left almost immediately. "I'm not going to be able to speak," she said. Why not? "I can't tell you that either. You're going to have to talk to my lawyer."

As it happens, Wynn Williams' lawyer, Ravi Naik, was at one time, my lawyer. He also represented David Carroll, the New York professor who tried to get his data back from Cambridge Analytica and whose story was followed in Netflix's The Great Hack, a documentary about the scandal that I also appeared in.

There was something very familiar about talking to Ravi about a very familiar big tech company behaving in an all too familiar way. Last week saw the ten year anniversary of the Brexit vote, the inciting incident that precipitated my years-long investigation into the platform and the bad actors who weaponised it and what was fascinating to me about Wynn Williams' book was not just what was in it - the details of working closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg - but what wasn't.

Wynn Williams was inside the company, operating at its highest echelons, when Cambridge Analytica harvested 87 million people's personal data, when Facebook first discovered it had done so, and when the first article was written about it (by the Guardian's Harry Davies).

She was there when I began reporting on it. And when Facebook lied to me in its responses to my press inquiries. That's not hyperbole. One of the many investigations that the Cambridge Analytica scandal triggered was undertaken by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It fined Facebook $100m for misleading shareholders and among the aggravating behaviour it noted was its lies to journalists - that included me.

There is nothing about Cambridge Analytica in the book, an omission I find curious. The fallout from the scandal continues to this day. There are still ongoing lawsuits, Zuckerberg has been deposed multiple times to answer questions on what the executives knew when and exactly if and how they deliberately misled shareholders. These are multi-million dollar questions still and I do wonder if my particular presence next to Wynn Williams posed a particular threat to the company and may have contributed to what happened next.

Ravi explained that Facebook was threatening Sarah with punitive damages if she spoke at the event. It was suing her under the terms of an NDA that she signed as part of a severance deal. That enabled it to take her to an arbitration court - a private tribunal - where an arbitrator had granted it a temporary order that banned her from promoting the book and making "disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental comments" about the company.

The plan had been that she, Tim and I would talk about big tech generally, not the specifics of the book, but Facebook had got wind of it and written to her warning her that participating in the event in the presence of a "Carole Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist best known for her criticism of Facebook" and "another known critic" would put her in breach of the temporary order.

The solution, she'd decided, was to appear but not to speak.

Predictably, Facebook's actions backfired. I described her on stage as "an author in a hostage situation" and the resulting spectacle was reported across the media.

It was petty and vindictive and Wynn Williams' solution was a spectacular bit of political theatre that highlighted the ridiculousness of the act.

I've been mulling over the deeper meaning of that event and what Facebook did and was struck by this headline and report in Axios last week:

Big tech companies acting like nation states is what many people, myself included, have been saying for many years but what makes this stand out is that it's not coming from any of us. It's Axios, a business-friendly news site and the headline and the report are simply statements of fact.

The leaders of US AI companies now have - quite literally - a seat at the table. In the photo above, President Macron, the G7 host, is seated next to Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, while Trump has Sam Altman on one side and Google DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, on the other.

And it's in this context that we need to consider Facebook's behaviour. In my view, its threatened retribution against Wynn Williams was performative, a punishment beating deliberately designed to deter future whistleblowers, but Wu had gone further. He's a pretty cautious, legally precise academic and he used the word "authoritarian".

Again, this is not hyperbole. Wu, a professor of law at Columbia, is one of the most authoritative experts on Silicon Valley monopolies. He has also been on the frontline on trying to find ways to regulate them including as a tech advisor to the Biden White House and inside the Federal Trade Commission.

And it's what he wrote afterwards, in the Guardian, that has stayed with me.

"Were this a book about time spent in government, it is clear that free speech principles would protect the author's right to speak (at least about unclassified matters). But because her book is critical of a private company - and because, as an employee, she signed standard agreements banning 'disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments' - Meta is in a position to punish its critic and deter anyone else who may dare to speak against it."

"We live in a time when the power of private firms is regularly compared to nation states. Why, therefore, allow the legal system to become a party to corporate censorship? Look past the legal niceties and we are, in essence, granting corporate CEOs - in this case, Mark Zuckerberg - the kind of censorial prerogative usually sought by authoritarian leaders."

It's the comparison that struck me. If Wynn-Williams worked inside the Trump administration, this wouldn't be possible. Her rights would be protected. We accept the idea of corporate NDAs as commonplace, a cost of doing business, but Wu makes an important point about what that means. And especially what that means when we've reached a place where even the G7 nation states are treating these companies on an equal footing.

But the saga doesn't end there.

To say that Facebook's stunt backfired is to put it mildly: the ensuing media storm saw her book sales increase by 305%.

And on Thursday, another shot was fired. This time by Wynn Williams. She's now suing Meta. And in the court documents - flagged on Twitter by my friend and indefatigable tracker of Big Tech lawsuits, Jason Kint - it reveals that Facebook wrote to her after the event. Among its complaints was that it found my and Tim Wu's response "disparaging".

Well, yes, doh. That was exactly the point.

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Facebook's use of an arbitration court to silence Sarah Wynn Williams is not an accident. There's no shortage of courts in either the US or UK, where Wynn Williams now lives. Criminal courts to try criminal cases and civil courts to settle business and other disputes.

But arbitration courts are an entirely parallel system. It's commonplace for Silicon Valley companies to force them as a procedure for settling disputes not just in severance agreements but in joining agreements. Almost everyone who goes to work for a social media platform signs a contract on joining that prevents them from ever disclosing confidential information about what happens inside the company before they've even started their jobs.

It's one reason why vanishingly few people have ever spilled the beans. The other is that they've drunk the kool aid/had their mouths have stuffed with gold/been so deeply compromised they're in a state of denial or in Nick Clegg's case all three.

It's an ongoing source of pain to me that the former deputy prime minister and latterly Facebook's head of policy and spin, is considered a plausible voice on anything to do with Silicon Valley.

Clegg has signed exactly the same kind of severance agreement that Wynn Williams has. He's not dishing any dirt because he's been paid handsomely not to and because he's still a believer. It's preposterous that he's treated as any sort of independent authority.

Tech companies use arbitration courts because they can. Just as they write the terms of service that we the users have no choice but to accept, they also write the contracts that employees must sign to take a job. It's a legitimised form of corporate bullying, a non-state parallel justice system. And now one that Sarah Wynn Williams finds herself trapped in.

And it maps onto other networks, one used by criminals and gangsters. I found myself investigating arbitration courts, some years ago, when I was trying to understand why and how Cambridge Analytica was seeking to set one up in St Kitts and Nevis.

I never uncovered a definitive answer to that but I did speak to a lawyer who'd been involved in the scheme. What are some of the dodgier possible use cases of arbitration courts, I asked him. "Well, money laundering for one," he said. It's a simple matter to set up a fake arbitration to settle a fake dispute. Party A seeks resolution to a dispute with Party B, a judge finds in Party B's favour and Party A has to pay them a load of cash. The money is legitimately washed through another company's accounts.

Another scenario is where individuals use these courts to seize assets by illegitimate means. Nice company you keep, Facebook.

As chance would have it, I found myself on a call with another lawyer last week who's an expert in these private arbitration courts. She had been following how the owners of Prospera - who include Peter Thiel - are trying to use them against the Honduran government.

Prospera is a fake country invented by tech bros. Prospera is a charter city or "Network State", a libertarian experiment funded by a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs, in which a tract of land in Honduras became a test bed for their ideas without the interference of that annoyance that all tech bros loathe: government.

One of the investors in the project, Balaji Srinivasan, has written a book called "Network State" although he stole the concept from Curtis Yarvin, a cod-philosopher (who I wrote about here) who stole it from someone else. But then it's neither clever or radical, it's a trite cross between disaster capitalism and tech-utopianism in which instead of citizens, you have consumers and instead of an elected leader, you have a CEO. And instead of laws banning things like human experimentation - which has had a bad rap since Josef Mengele - you have a free market economy in which if someone is willing to be paid to be a human guinea pig for untested drugs, you can go right ahead.

There have been various attempts to create the cryptolibertarian dream and for a time, Prospera on Honduras's Roatan peninsula seemed like it might be the most successful of these. But now, the new government has cooled on it. And this is where the arbitration court comes in, Prospera's owners are attempting to heavy the government to do its bidding through this private, parallel, non-state legal system.

Meanwhile, as I said in the intro, Thiel's attention has moved on to his next prey: Argentina. Why bother to go to all the effort of creating a new country when you can take over an existing one?

And Javier Milei is proving himself a willing ally. This is the op-ed that he wrote for the FT in which he framed lack of any regulation for AI as the latest, most logical evolution of the free market economy. (A free link here, also.)

And he writes about Argentina's plans to create "the non-human corporation. These are entities operated by AI agents or robots".

Argentina is Thiel's petri dish. I fear he is looking for others too, including the UK. I want to write about how Britain is uniquely vulnerable among western nations to a corporate-style takeover of determined anti-democrats, our lack of constitutional protections makes us more vulnerable than almost any other country.

I'm not the only person to have noticed that. Far-right political podcasters have made similar observations with very different framing. The talk isn't of danger, it's "opportunity".

More on that soon. In the meantime here is Argentinian reporter Uki Goñi, on his observations on Thiel's Buenos Aires residency:

"In 1977, Argentina's dictatorship recorded my phone conversations. That required plainclothes men manually connecting a tape recorder to the phone wiring on the roof of my apartment building. I ran into them trotting down the stairs a couple of times, spools of recording tape snaking out of their leather satchels.

"I had just started working at the newsroom of the Buenos Aires Herald, a small English-language daily that was the only one in Argentina reporting on the thousands of "disappeared" victims of the dictatorship.

The recent move of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and his family to Argentina has revived this painful memory of being spied upon. ln April, Thiel met with Argentina's "anarcho-capitalist" president Javier Milei, who claims to be waging a "culture war" between "the forces of heaven" and "communism", echoing the speeches of Argentina's 1970s generals.

"I wondered about two things in the 1970s. First, could an Argentine-style oligarchy stage a coup one day in the US, the country where I had been born and raised? Second, would authoritarians of the future still need to manually transcribe endless hours of phone calls?

"Following the return of democracy I started writing books on these topics and interviewed some of the Nazis who escaped here after 1945. These Germans shared Argentina's trans-generational belief in a "culture war", only that in our 21st-century version, at least so far, it has not led to mass murder.

"The visitors from the US were David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger back then, empowering and emboldening Argentina's conspiracy-minded authoritarians who saw an "enemy of western and christian civilization" behind every signpost.

"I can't help but wonder what a new generation of wacko authoritarians could achieve, freed by the digital tools we now possess from lugging around spools of recording tape to monitor their prey."

Me too.

I'm hosting an online event on Tuesday, organised by the Citizens and Volt Europa, on the "Hostile Takeover of Democracy by Big Tech" and specifically about Europe's urgent need for digital sovereignty and what that means. Subscribe here for a notification on when it goes live.

And do read my latest investigation in the Nerve. It's the latest in our series, the Harborne Receipts, a focused, urgently needed deep dive into the crypto money flooding into UK politics through one man, Christopher Harborne. If you're in the US, where the crypto bros were some of the biggest funders of Trump in the last election, you will know this playbook. Harborne is a cryptobillionaire who, according to legal filings, owns 12% of the so-called "stablecoin" Tether.

There's a developing scandal in Britain - finally! - into the money behind Nigel Farage who failed to disclose a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne. In our investigation yesterday, we reveal that Boris Johnson also failed to reveal a gift from Harborne of private jet flights when still an MP two months after giving him a personal gift of £1m.

And none of that even touches the sides of Tether which is embroiled in multiple political scandals across the pond. If you want to get into that, start with Howard Lutnick, friend of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein who Senator Elizabeth Warren is trying to investigate. She describes Tether as "a foreign company whose stablecoin has been used to finance illicit activity around the world". Its involvement in US politics is, she says, a threat to national security.

I'll end it here. Crypto, Prospera, Argentina's AI bill, the silencing of a whistleblower, it's all of a piece, a shift in power structures that is tending away from the nation state towards a post-state reality owned and run by a group of men who believe they are more powerful than gods.

This is what we're up against.

Thank you for your patience, support and encouragement. I take so much from it, Carole

PS: There's someone else who I think signed a joining agreement when they went to work for a Silicon Valley company. Someone who is now working in one of the most important roles in British public life. Someone who is now responsible for a partnership with that Silicon Valley company but won't say if they're constrained in what they can or cannot say about it: Matt Brittin, formerly the head of Google Europe, now the director-general of the BBC.

The BBC's press office is simply refusing to answer my questions on this although the BBC's partnership with YouTube, means it's a potentially horrible conflict of interest. Like Clegg, what's perhaps most egregious of all about these contracts is that their terms and conditions are private. Individuals come out of these companies and it's not just that they guard their secrets and don't criticise them publicly, we simply don't whether they are constrained under what terms and under threat of what penalties, having taken what inducements. It's an invisible form of control that creates a class of people influencing our public life while still in thrall to these companies.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

With gratitude for sharing/subscribing. Thank you.

Two weeks ago, I attended and spoke at the International Journalism Festival, an annual event held in the beautiful Italian hilltop town of Perugia. How nice for you, I suspect you're thinking, and it was, but this is not the point of this post, although this story does begin with me drinking wine on a spring evening on a beautiful Italian square with a bunch of international friends from journalism and its allied fields.

So far, so unbearably smug you'd be quite right to think, but then, the friend I was with, suddenly took a sharp intake of breath.

"Is that…Wael Al-Dahdouh?" she said in shock and pointed to a man a few feet away who was walking through the crowd.

It was Wael Al-Dahdouh and even if his name isn't familiar, you'll have likely seen the viral news clips of him in his blue PRESS flak jacket on social media. He was Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Gaza, where he reported on atrocity after atrocity, including the one where, live on air, he discovered a missile had killed his wife, his seven-year-old daughter and his 15-year-old son. Five nephews and nieces and his 18-month-old grandson were also killed in the same strike.

Two months later, he was seen bending over the body of another son, Hamza, who followed him into journalism and also worked for Al Jazeera. All the time, he kept on reporting.

It was a moment of sharp cognitive dissonance. Wael has seen and experienced things that are beyond imagination but were also livestreamed to us on our phones in real time, while the world did nothing. And now, here he was, mingling with the international press corps. He had the air of someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

We were standing outside Perugia's grandest hotel, the Brufani, which played a small role in Mussolini's rise to power: back in 1922, it became home to the fascist supreme command and was used to plan his "March on Rome", the insurrection that propelled Mussolini to power. It was late and Perugia, boiling by day, still had a chilly springtime edge to it in the evening. Suddenly, it felt hard to ignore.

Everything looks normal, but it isn't. And Wael is a symbol of that. He lost his family to a series of war crimes that have gone unpunished even as he continued, in spite of everything, to document them as they happened.

No-one has been held to account. There is no coordinated international outcry. And yet, here he was, walking among us.

Two days later, in another stunning setting, the beautiful 13th century Church of San Francesco al Prato, Wael told his story.

What shocked him most, he said, more even than what Israel did, was what the international community didn't do. And most especially what we didn't do: the international journalism community.

"We just felt so alone," he said. It was the lack of solidarity that was most difficult to bear, he said. Even as journalist after journalist was murdered, where was the response from news organisations around the world?

It was a deeply shaming moment.

I wrote a little about this in a newsletter that the Nerve put out last week. We included a video and transcript of Wael's talk on the site but I wanted to re-visit it for several intertwined reasons.

Sunday, May 3, was World Press Freedom Day. And yesterday was the end of a bank holiday weekend in Britain, a public holiday that celebrates the ancient spring rituals that developed around May Day but also, as in many other countries, International Workers' Day.

And what I want to do in this newsletter is to connect those two things not least because I've read a lot of self-regarding articles about World Press Freedom Day from news organisations that have not shown any particular solidarity to Palestinian journalists, or realised that this lack of solidarity will one day come to bite them on the arse.

There are also two anniversaries I'm marking in this newsletter. It's a year since the Guardian gave away the Observer newspaper in the face of days of protests from 93% of its journalists. And a year since I went back to TED and gave a talk that used my journalistic experience of being targeted and silenced as both a warning and a call to action.

If this feels like a jumble of disparate topics, well, they are, in fact, connected. Silence, normalisation, cowardice, fear, and the shortcomings of the institutions are what connects them. And I'm returning again, to the assault on press freedom, because it's the canary in the coalmine. And the canary is croaking.

I've been posting here less than I'd like to because I have been trying to build a new news organisation, with my ex-Guardian/Observer colleagues, because it's felt like the most important thing that I could be doing in this moment. Without independent media, we are doomed. And without press freedom, there is no freedom.

Gaza was the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. Israel has killed 232 Palestinian journalists since October 2023, more than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the United States war in Afghanistan combined.

But what's happened to journalists in Gaza didn't happen in a vacuum. It's just the tip of the spear. A report, just published by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), reveals that press freedom is at a 25-year low. It's diminishing almost everywhere at an astonishing rate. The report includes a press freedom index that shows America is now a shocking 64th on its list behind Namibia, Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Tonga, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Samoa, Panama, Botswana, Gabon and Ghana.

In the last year, vast swathes of the US press have been captured or defanged: CBS has been gutted from within, its editorial integrity destroyed after being bought by the Ellison family, a key Trump ally, that has already gained control of TikTok and is in the throes of an $81bn takeover of Warner Bros that will give it control of, among many other media properties, CNN's newsroom.

Protestors have been shot in the street and journalists who reported on these protests have been arrested. The Washington Post, owned by another billionaire tech ally, has laid off hundreds of reporters and neutered its editorial pages but Bezos's sponsorship of the Met Gala last night saw him wash his hands of their blood. Meanwhile, the chair of the powerful FCC, Brendan Carr, has been threatening news outlets with losing their broadcast licences for so-called "distortions" over their coverage of the Iran war.

I've been reflecting on this moment now versus this moment a year ago because, it's impossible to believe that my TED talk caused such a stir at both the conference and then online. It was a warning of what Silicon Valley's merger with Trump's authoritarianism means and where it will lead and a year on, so much of what I warned might happen, has now happened.

The attacks on journalists, the silencing, the corporate capture and surrender have now come. It's real, not foretold. The totalising all-encompassing power of Silicon Valley coupled with Trump's America has given us the ultimate dystopic endgame, a hallucinated war, fed by hallucinating algorithms that has blown up school children and blocked shipping channels for reasons that defy logic, common sense, rational belief, historical memory.

Trump's attack on Iran is a cognitive weapon he's turned on his own people. Us. We are numbed to it all. That's what's changed in a year. It has all come to pass but our shock and outrage has run out. The abnormal is the new normal. We've had to accept that.

Except it's not normal. None of it it is. And that's what Wael's haunted face in Perugia brought home to me.

He was the ghost of Christmas past at Perugia, but he's also the ghost of Christmas future. His family were killed by a country that my country arms and supports, a country whose prime minister who's a close ally of the tech leaders whose products are integrated into our daily lives, who hold government contracts, who are knitted into the very fabric of our state.

How is that normal? It isn't. It's an affront. And Wael was right to call out the catastrophic moral failure of journalism on the biggest stage in front of the world's journalists at what is the world's biggest journalism conference. And he's also right to understand how what's happened to journalists in Gaza, the impunity with which they've been targeted and murdered, won't end there.

But he was wrong about one thing. Afterwards, I found him outside, with a brilliant investigative journalist I know, Hoda Osman, the executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. I'd bonded with Hoda at another conference where she'd presented a detailed report on another Gazan journalist murdered by Israeli soldiers and had been blindsided from the audience by an American producer who accused her of covering for Hamas.

"You're not alone," I told Wael while Hoda translated. There are so many journalists who support you. And I gestured at the journalist next to me, Sangita Myska, an ex-BBC journalist, who was sacked without warning from her job presenting a show on Britain's commercial radio station, LBC, after a combative interview with an Israeli government official.

"It's the leaders of western news organisations who are the problem not the journalists," I said.

Because they haven't led, they've cowered or simply dodged the issue. There's been an abject lack of leadership; a hollow vacuum where it ought to be. It's not that news organisations can't co-operate. In Britain, just over a year ago, every front cover of every newspaper - with radically different political views - carried a "Make it Fair" campaign ad over the government's plans to tear up copyright laws. They acted in unison out of joint self-interest. And it worked! The government actually backed down.

It is possible. Just not on this subject. Last summer, RSF or Reporters Without Borders, one of the most prominent press freedom organisations in the world organised a news blackout in partnership with Avaaz and asked news titles to black out their front pages in solidarity with Palestinian journalists. This was L'Orient Le Jour, a Lebanese newspaper, published:

Lebanese journalists, of course, understood that they would be next. As it's inevitably turned out to be: the recent terrible murder of Amal Khalil joins a list of 21 Lebanese journalists killed since October 7. Around the world, 250 outlets joined the blackout (including this newsletter) but they were mostly smaller independent outlets though Britain's Independent was an honourable exception. The big boys refused to play. My former employer, the Guardian, was among the prominent western news organisations who declined, despite multiple efforts from journalists advocating internally and even as their own correspondents and stringers operated at huge risk.

And this is why I'm writing this today. Because May 1 - International Workers' Day - and May 3 - World Press Freedom Day - need to be understood as two sides of the same coin.

The solidarity that gave us basic rights and protections that spawned the labour movement was a solidarity between individuals not organisations, not management, or boards. And, we can't leave the defence of press freedom to editors and CEOs who have, increasingly, corporatised World Press Freedom Day. In one particularly tense meeting during the Guardian dispute, one executive let slip that that it was one of the best opportunities in the year to "monetize" the brand.

These are execs (paid hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds) who are using the day not to campaign for justice for the likes of Wael al-Dahdouh but to push fundraising campaigns while failing to defend the most basic of all journalistic rights: to stay alive.

And while I'm thrilled with the news from yesterday that Saher Algorrha, a Palestinian photojournalist has won a Pulitzer Prize for his incredible photographs from Gaza for the NYT at the height of the famine (gift link to his portfolio here), it was while he was photographing those harrowing scenes, short of food and in grave danger himself, the NYT's management declined to join the global news blackout to highlight the targeted killing of his colleagues. Why? The NYT will dine out on that Pulitzer. But what did they do to protect, defend, fight for justice for Algorrha's colleagues? Nothing! And there are so many things the Times could do. It's a choice.

And it's these same corporate management teams who discourage journalists from posting on social media on "controversial" or contentious topics. There's a sound editorial logic behind this, to maintain objectivity on politically sensitive subjects, but the murder of journalists is a war crime and there's nothing "political" about it. The overwhelming ongoing silence from all but a handful of journalists is, in part, I suspect because of a fear of breaking these social media codes, an obedience reinforced by the silence from the top. If their editors had spoken, they would be free to do so too.

There's more sensible journalists than me who would not write these things, who would be far more judicious about criticising their former news organisations or any news organisation, but I'm doing so because press freedom is a proxy for everything else that is happening right now. It's at the centre of a Gordian knot of democratic decline and authoritarian takeover and, what Wael told us is that every single gesture of support is meaningful. It gave him hope, he said.

It was his use of the word "solidarity", or lack of it, that spoke to me. I know how that feels, how it sticks in the craw, how pathetically grateful one can be for any scrap of support. It's why I remain indebted to the press freedom organisations that stepped in and spoke up for me. Why I now have to do so for others.

But what's mystifying to me is how news organisations don't understand that it's also basic self interest. How they don't understand what's coming for them next. Even the NYT. It might be the last bastion to fall, bulwarked by power and money and prestige but, you don't have to be Cassandra to think that one day, even it may need some outside help to campaign on its behalf. The ongoing castration of the US media is a warning that even now we're failing to heed and it's a folly to think that what happened to journalists in Palestine and now Lebanon is an exception to the rule. The rules have changed. There are new rules. And impunity is chief among them.

Press freedom is the canary that's gasping for air. Gaza is the roadmap to understand what's coming next. And murdering journalists is the least of it. Its revolting "Board of Peace" is a privatized UN run by some of the worst people on the planet. Its plans for redevelopment are a tech bros' fever dream, the promised "network state", a land without citizens, only subjects and consumers, kept in line by an all-powerful CEO.

And it's why May 1 should set the example for what May 3 should be. Our colleagues are being killed and if it's not us who stand for them, then who will? The dam can and must break. Journalists' solidarity has to be with each other not their corporate overlords. A lone, prominent NYT journalist, Nick Kristof, finally spoke up this week. In the Nerve, we've published the BBC's veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson a couple of weeks ago (a task and a half as he had to have it signed off by the head of BBC News) and now the Sunday Times's foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, has also stepped up calling for an international body to investigate crimes against journalists. The dam is breaking.

What these individual voices are doing is leading from below. It can be done. Even Google DeepMind employees in London are learning that lesson. They've been speaking out about the company's partnership with the US Department of War and it was reported today, they are voting to unionize.

That's what unions are for. And that's what we need now. A union of unions. That's what May 1 can teach us, that leadership will not come from editors-in-chiefs and publishers of mainstream western news orgs; they do not have this. But there are, I believe, thousands of journalists across the world who do. Wael is not alone. We are with him. But how do we make our voices heard?

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In one of my panels in Perguia, I described how it was going on strike that inspired the team behind the Nerve: action is agency and fighting for your journalistic values was the spark that lit the flame. Six months on, I'm delighted and honestly gobsmacked to report that it's working. We have announced four fantastic new hires today: investigative journalists Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Alice McCool and columnists Sangita Myska and Cory Doctorow.

Thank you for reading and for bearing with the patchy publication schedule of this newsletter. Please let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree or have ideas for what needs to happen next. Consider this newsletter a call to action. What is the action that is needed? And if you want to support Palestinian journalists, I recommend donating to International Media Support. The Committee to Protect Journalists and RSF also do excellent work supporting journalists across the world and I'm so glad they're there.

Thank you, as ever, for reading/supporting/caring. x

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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I wrote a post here in the odd, slowed-down time between Christmas and New Year and borrowed a friend's description of that time, aka the "perineum" of the year. It struck me today that we're in the perineum of this latest war, suspended between its arsehole - the first strikes on Tehran - and the full looming catastrophe.

There's an atmosphere of suspended animation. The world still seems normal. War is far away. The people being bombed and killed are not our friends and neighbours or their soldier sons.

But it can't last. There's a Covid-like quality to the denial as if what happens abroad can't affect us here. That the fuel protests in the Philippines which has declared a "national emergency" won't come for us. Or the closing of factories in Gujarat that employ 400,000 people but can't operate due to lack of gas. Or Egypt, where shops and restaurants have been ordered to shut by 9pm.

We can't even hear the words that the head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, is saying: "We are in for a real shock that is probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment."

What's coming is the everything crisis. And Lagarde is right. We can't imagine it because it's too big, there are too many second-order effects, the markets and therefore the news cycle is pretending it isn't happening and we continue to live in the cosseted ignorance that an impulsive, imperialist, irrational illegal act of war by the world's (former?) superpower isn't our problem.

But there's no overnight fix for the destruction of the Gulf's energy infrastructure. We're already in an information crisis, a democracy crisis, a worldwide populist insurgency. Now add a global economic shock - the biggest one ever, according to the International Energy Agency - into the mix. To take just one example, of one cascading event, the AI bubble boom is dependent on chips which are dependent on helium and a third of the world's supply from Qatar has just been taken offline.

And while, a lot of people would like to see Sam Altman's business crash and burn, it'll likely take down the global economy (and your pension) with it too.

Meanwhile, as we wait for what comes next and numb-scroll social media, I found myself captivated by a video posted by Iran's embassy in South Africa. Do you remember the viral vid of the skateboarding TikToker cruising the freeway chugging Ocean Spray to the sound of Fleetwood Mac?

It's from October 2020, remember then? When we tried to kid ourselves that a second wave wouldn't come for us again. Well, this is what the Iranian government posted a couple of days ago and I can't stop watching it (click to press play).

Who knows how or where any of this will end. But this video is a reminder that Iran is ruled by a truly terrible regime but it's also a vast country of 92 million people, many of whom are highly educated and this is world class shitposting memetic warfare from a sophisticated adversary that's been systematically, calamitously underestimated by Donald Trump.

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On Friday, I published a long post about the global assault on the news and the oligarchic capture of news organisations. And I've decided to write again today because Israel has targeted and killed three more journalists, this time in Lebanon, adding to at least 260 it's killed in Gaza.

There's a moral responsibility for journalists in the rest of the world to speak up for journalists who are killed, especially when, as in this case, they are killed for being journalists.

It's not even a "claim" to say that. The IDF has admitted it, details below. The killing of journalists in a conflict zone is a war crime. But then the line where war crimes begin and end in a series of illegal wars isn't a line any more, so much as a crayon smeared across a wall by an out-of-control toddler. And the lack of uproar about the systematic targeting of journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon is the dog that didn't bark.

Just as we're in denial about the blowback that's going to roar our way from the unfolding disaster in the Middle East, we fail to understand how the impunity with which Israel murders journalists will come for us too. Trump and Netanyahu are in an escalating game of chicken, stretching the boundaries of what's possible, what's normal, what we accept. It's why we're here. And it never stops with them, these new norms travel, like the Covid virus, to every other would-be demagogue around the world.

America is already at the arresting journalists stage. Israel has faced no accountability for the systematic targeting and murder of journalists. There's been not a murmur about these latest killings from Israel's allies, including Britain.

Ali Shoeib, a reporter for three decades with Al-Manar and a well-known face in Lebanon, was travelling in a car with another reporter for Al Mayadeen, Fatima Ftouni and her brother, cameraman Mohamed Ftouni. Four missiles hit their car on the highway near the town of Jezzine. Charred press vests were pulled from the ruins.

Al-Manar is a Hezbollah affiliated outlet but what you need to know about Hezbollah is that it is both an Iran-backed militia and one of the main sources of social services for the impoverished Shia population. President Joseph Aoun, a Christian and a vicious critic of everything Hezbollah-related has been unequivocal in describing the journalists as civilians and the killings as "a blatant crime that violates all the norms and treaties under which journalists enjoy international protection in wars."

The IDF admitted the killing and justified it. They called Shoeib a "terrorist" who had "operated for years under the guise of a journalist". The BBC reported: "The IDF provided no evidence to support its claim that Shoeib had a military role. It did not comment on the deaths of Fatima or Mohamed Ftouni."

But the IDF did provide a visual. This post on X which showed Shoeib in a military uniform.

I'll let Fox News take up the story of what happened next. Its correspondent asked the IDF's press office where the photo of Shoeib in uniform had been taken.

In his broadcast report, he gave their response:

"When asked by Fox News about the origin of the photo, an IDF spokesman said, 'Unfortunately there isn't really a picture of it, it was photoshopped.'"

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Read any UK or US newspaper and you'd never know there was a war in Lebanon. You wouldn't know that one nation state has embarked on a ground invasion of another nation state. That it has captured a vast portion of the country and driven more than a million people from their homes.

Words matter and the words I've seen to describe what's happening in Lebanon are false and wrong. It's a "ground campaign" in the same way that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a "ground campaign". It's a "buffer zone" in the same way Russia's capture of Donetsk and Mariupol is a "buffer zone". We don't use that language to describe Putin's war of terror on Ukraine, so why is it acceptable for newspapers to use it in Lebanon?

Israel's terminology for the war has dominated what limited coverage there has been. Though mostly it hasn't even made the front pages of the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC.

To refresh your memory over the timeline here: Israel attacked Iran. Days later, Iran's allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, attacked back. Israel then started bombing Beirut, dropping banned white phosphorous on South Lebanon, driving the entire population of the area from their homes and blowing up the bridges.

Last week, AP, which supplies news and reports to most international newsrooms, put out this statement:

"The Associated Press is now calling Israel's military actions in southern Lebanon an invasion.

Israel has moved thousands of troops across the border into Lebanon, and Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants have been fighting on the ground for at least three weeks."

I hope it makes a difference though this is the latest from the Times:

I leave you with a travel vid that I found on TikTok of Jezzine, the town where Al Shoeib and Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed. They were real people. This is a real place, one that some claim is the most beautiful village in Lebanon. It was still under occupation by Israel's proxies when I wrote a guidebook to the country in the early 90s; the invasion and occupation that first gave rise to Hezbollah. I read tantalising descriptions of a town ringed by waterfalls in a 1960s Blue Guide (our main reference to the country) but only finally got there in 2000, a few weeks after Israel pulled out of the south, with the Lebanese army still detonating mines by the sides of the road.

But it was a new beginning. Tourists would once again come. A quarter of a century on, it seems unbelievable that the whole cycle of violence could have begun again, so casually, so carelessly, under cover of the war on Iran, with the world barely even noticing or realising…

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A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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This week, the BBC announced the appointment of a new director general. An ex-Google middle manager called Matt Brittin who will lead the publicly-owned corporation at a time when its entire existence is under threat. The next years are crucial: Nigel Farage, whose far-right Reform party is surging in the polls, hasn't disguised his Trumpian desire to smash it to pieces.

I've written about Brittin in the Nerve this week because I believe it's a disastrous appointment for the BBC and therefore us all. It's a choice rooted in our ongoing naivity about Silicon Valley technology firms including Google that's still seen as a dynamic start-up not a rapacious AI company that's actively trying to destroy journalism.

Google's AI summaries now appear at the top of every search, they scrape journalists' work while simultaneously tanking traffic to their websites. Since they were introduced, some websites have seen up to an 80% fall. And Brittin is your standard issue AI hype man.

Last year, he was appointed to the Guardian's board to help the organisation navigate decisions about AI and the organisation promptly entered into a "strategic partnership" with one of the worst companies on the planet, OpenAI.

This is tech capture. It's a playbook we've seen play out time and time again. And, as an ardent believer in the importance of independent media and the survival of both the Guardian and BBC, I think it's a terrible, terrible error of judgment. Silicon Valley creates dependencies in media companies that gives them leverage to avoid negative coverage and crucially regulation including through a range of techniques that include blackmail and extortion. There's chapter and verse in this very good report, this just one example:

In the US, the Washington Post has been hollowed out by one tech broligarch (Jeff Bezos) and CBS and TikTok have been captured by another (the Ellisons). CNN is the next in line. Larry Ellison's son David is set to take control of Paramount which owns CNN and HBO among a welter of other media brands. CBS, which it already controls. already become a hollowed-out husk of a once vital US network. Oliver Darcy of Status also reported this week that viewers are turning off in droves. This is a media crisis wrapped inside a political crisis.

The UK's media was pre-captured. Our print media is overwhelmingly oligarch owned. But the process is accelerating here also. The German company Axel Springer is buying the Telegraph in a £575m deal. It's owned by another Trump ally, Mathias Döpfner who's also close to Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir. Thiel is actually in business with Döpfner's son, Moritz, investing $50m into a fund he founded.

And this Sunday, my old newspaper, the Observer - which was an integral part of the Guardian until a year ago - published a story on Palantir that made my heart sink.

At the Nerve, we've investigated Palantir's chokehold on the UK government, we've found Ministry of Defence whistleblowers who claim it's a threat to national security, and revealed the UK pension funds who are fuelling its growth. I've written here about its role in what I believe is the US's descent into technofascism. And of course, in this newsletter, Peter Thiel, one of the most dangerous men on the planet, is a regular character.

This is what alerted me to the Observer piece. Two glowing endorsements from…Palantir's UK CEO, Louis Mosley.

Mosley is the grandson of Oswald Mosley who founded the British Union of Fascists, aka "Blackshirts". The examples he cites were case studies that the Observer's political editor had exclusively obtained. Mosley also granted her an exclusive interview. For comparison, Palantir did not respond to any of the press inquiries we sent it before our first investigation. The Observer piece is behind a paywall - as all its journalism now is - but there's a text version here.

What's noteworthy here is that Palantir is being covered by my old newspaper by the political editor as a political story. UK political reporting is largely a time-honoured game of favour trading that sees journalists use politicians to give up their gossip and politicians use journalists to channel their spin.

Certainly this is the game (and journalists) that Palantir's press man in the UK knows: he previously worked at Number 10 Downing Street. I may be wrong and we can never know but I don't believe the Observer of a year ago would have run this piece. Not because of me or my strongly held views on the threat Peter Thiel poses to democracy (his words, not mine: Thiel says democracy is "incompatible" with freedom) but because of normal editorial processes.

News organisations make mistakes. The Observer famously did when it backed the Iraq War. But channelling Palantir spin into a double-page spread without robustly interrogating the provenance of the story or the motivations behind it? A simple fact check would have revealed Mosley's claims weren't even true. The case study Palantir provided made the bold claim that Palantir had prevented all domestic murders in Bedfordshire last year.

"Usually 5 or 6 domestic murders a year," Mosley tweeted quoting the article. "Last 12 months? Zero. By using Palantir, Bedfordshire Police identified 1,000+ women whose partners had a history of domestic abuse - and warned them they could be in danger."

Er, no, as the journalist Iain Overton points out. He found at least two Bedfordshire women murdered in their homes last year. I also asked a solicitor who specialises in domestic abuse what she made of the piece:

The UK police have a persistent track record in failing to act on domestic abuse and threats of violence against women. And what Bedfordshire Police have done, with the assistance of the Observer, is to techwash these failures via Palantir's press office.

All of which begs the question: why?

It's nearly a year since the Guardian "transferred" the Observer to a group of private investors along with £5m. It did so after a bitter dispute with its journalists, 93% of whom voted to go on strike. I've written here about Tortoise Media, the company that acquired it, and here about the issues with the deal including the friendship between James Harding, Tortoise's founder and the Guardian's CEO, Anna Bateson, who cooked this deal up. And here, about the day we left the Guardian.

In a meeting, on the day the deal was done, we asked Anna Bateson for the names of Tortoise's new incoming investors. She told us she would send a list after the meeting. That offer was rescinded. The Guardian said Tortoise Media had to supply the names. Tortoise Media declined to do so.

The new known investors include a major political donor to the Labour Party and the controversial thinktank, Labour Together, Gary Lubner, and the owner of Prospect magazine, Clive Cowdery.

But just before Christmas, Tortoise Media, now the owners of the Observer, published a new financial filing with the UK registry, Companies House, which finally listed the names of all shareholders. Most of them were already in the public domain, which made the secrecy all the more baffling. But one caught my eye: "The North Hatley Trust."

The North Hatley Trust had been a seed investor in the company and in the latest round had bought a further 434,234 shares. That made it one of the Observer's biggest investors. When I'd seen the name in the seed round I assumed that North Hatley Trust was…a trust, ie some sort of non-profit or family foundation. But when I looked more closely, I found it was just the name of an opaque financial vehicle. An opaque financial vehicle that is now one of the biggest shareholders in the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.

The only information is a "Legal Entity Identifier" or LEI listing that reveals the barest of details and that's it. The "Parent" information - ultimate beneficial owner - is not provided.

These sorts of financial vehicles can be set up for all sorts of perfectly legitimate reasons. But they're also useful if you want to mask the true owners of a company or source of funds. They provide total anonymity.

They're also commonly used by investment firms for cross-border transactions or to administer sub-funds. (North Hatley is a small town in Canada, to save you the Google.) And there's just a few other tiny bits of information including that it was registered on Jan 20 last year:

And that its registered legal address and listed HQ is: Suite 5700, 415 Mission Street, San Francisco.

415 Mission Street is a pretty famous address in San Francisco. It's home to the city's landmark Salesforce Tower, a huge office building. But North Hatley Trust's address is much more specific than that. It's based in Suite 5700.

And that's where it gets interesting. Because it turns out that 415 Mission Street, Suite 5700 is the headquarters of Hellman & Friedman, a US private equity firm.

And I was already familiar with Hellman & Friedman because of this guy, another investor in Tortoise Media, Patrick Healy.

Healy is the CEO of Hellman & Friedman.

He sits on its investment committee, leads its European division and is core to its media acquisition team. He also led Hellman & Friedman's investment into, wait for it, Axel Springer, the Germany company now buying the Telegraph. (H&F has since exited from the firm.)

When James Harding came to present his vision for the Observer in the Guardian's office, he took questions and I put up my hand. Was Patrick Healy a fit and proper person to be an owner of our newspaper, I asked? And I explained my reasons why.

Two years ago, Hellman & Friedman was revealed to have taken an undisclosed amount of investment from the Saudi public investment fund, Sanabil.

And just so there's no doubt about who and what the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is, it's a $776bn fund personally led by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That's Mr "Bonesaw" to you, the man who the CIA concluded ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

The Guardian along with other media outlets rightly condemned the murder of Khashoggi in the strongest possible terms. It has published multiple blistering leaders on it, (leaders express the official voice of the newspaper). In 2018: "The Guardian view on the death of a critic: Riyadh must pay a price". It published another in 2019 and again in 2023, and perhaps most appositely, of all, yet again in 2023: The Guardian view on Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation: following the money.

"While most of the world is tightening its belt, Riyadh has billions to lavish on everything from PR executives to aid its rebranding to big-name architects to build the crown prince's "city of the future" in the desert, Neom…[meanwhile] Executions have almost doubled under the crown prince…

"Unlike Saudi nationals, foreigners are free to challenge the kingdom - yet instead many use their voices to laud it. Why then should the country pause, when the price of its actions is so low?"

Harding assured us that Healy had invested in Tortoise Media in a personal capacity. Subsequently, a group of press freedom organisations raised the same points about his Saudi connections with the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, who gave the same assurances.

Last December, I included Healy in a piece I wrote about Tortoise Media's funding and included his response in the article:

This week, a spokesman for Healy said that his investment in Tortoise is as an individual and not on behalf of his firm. He disclosed that, contrary to Harding's statement, he would not be participating in the latest round.

In fact, Healy did go on to participate in the latest round. As did the North Hatley Trust which is legally registered as being co-located in the office of his firm, Hellman & Friedman. I do not know if Healy has any relationship to or stake in the North Hatley Trust. Similiarly, I don't know whether Sanabil, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has any interest or money in the vehicle.

It does not publicly disclose its investments. The only public information, as Bloomberg reports, is that the Saudi Public Investment Fund commits around $2 billion a year into "venture, growth and small buyout assets worldwide" via portfolio companies of which Hellman & Friedman is one.

Neither Patrick Healy nor Hellman & Friedman responded to my queries on the matter. Nor did Tortoise Media/The Observer. This included a yes/no question of whether it has taken Saudi money. Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian and is a co-investor in Tortoise Media) did not respond either. Only the Guardian press office answered my emails. A spokesperson said it did not wish to comment on this matter.

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Thirty years ago, when I trained as a news journalist, the importance of the "right to reply" was drilled into me. It's an important defence in the event that a company goes legal but more than that it's a matter of fairness. Even just a few years ago, it was unusual for a press office to simply ignore journalists' inquiries. But now the rules on everything are broken and it's increasingly standard practice. Why bother responding to a news outlet when most people think it's "fake news" anyway?

But for a news organisation, it's another rupture of another norm.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the Observer is refusing to disclose the real identity of an opaque investor who happens to share an address with a private equity firm that's taken a ton of cash from Mr Bonesaw, that's why we send right to reply letters: to get the facts.

It's not just a box-ticking exercise, it's a crucial step to make sure you haven't jumped to conclusions. It's bad faith for anyone to not respond but something is profoundly broken when it's a liberal news organisation that champions transparency and accountability. It's the same reason why I believe the Guardian's secrecy over its deal with OpenAI is so profoundly wrong. You can't enter a financial arrangement with a subject you report on without disclosing the terms. Yet that's exactly what it's done.

Perhaps, you think, the Guardian's leadership is ignoring my questions because they perceive me as a troublemaker. Well, doh! Of course they do and of course I am. That's what investigative journalism is. They know that because they publish brilliant, important investigative journalism by my former colleagues.

I lost my job because I investigated this deal and my own news organisation, despite the same leadership's public statements that no jobs would be lost. It wasn't just me. The editor, Lucy Rock, lost her job too and last week, the Observer announced it was seeking further voluntary redundancies across the company with staff told they may be facing compulsory redundancies next.

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Three weeks after the transfer of the Observer to Tortoise Media took place, the UK government changed the law to allow foreign state ownership of UK news titles. They also backdated the legislation to a year previously.

At least four news organisations lobbied the minister in question to get this law changed according to a report in the Guardian. The details remain secret.

I genuinely don't know what to make of the government's decision on this or why now but there's no defensible argument for foreign state ownership of UK media, as argued in this excellent piece the by the Guardian financial editor, Nils Pratley:

In it, he actually points to the example of the Guardian and how it explained that it was taking a stake in Tortoise Media to "enshrine our values in the new ownership structure".

So where are these values? Who is the Guardian's co-investor in the Observer? Why the lack of transparency? How does this serve the public interest?

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I established these facts before Christmas, sent the right-to-replies and wrote it up as a straight-down-the-line news story. At that point, I sent it to trusted senior financial journalists and editors to sense-check it and get their input. And then I left it.

When I came to read it again, I doubted that anyone outside the small world of UK media would understand it or be interested. Stories about financial disclosures are pretty dull. More importantly, the "third person" omniscient voice is a con. A news story can look "balanced" and obscure all sorts of biases or agendas. And people know that. It's why increasing numbers of people don't trust newspapers any more.

I've taken a decision to write this in my own voice, as me, to clearly state my priors, and to lay out the evidence for you to judge for yourself. I've long been inspired by OSINT - open source intelligence. It's a form of investigation that's collaborative, open, doesn't rely on unnamed sources and provides the evidence that you can double-check yourself. I'm not asking you to trust me on any of this.

I'm laying out what I've found. I don't know what or who the North Hatley Trust is or why the Guardian and Observer won't say. I doubt it's in any way connected to the Palantir puff piece but I've decided to publish this today because it speaks to the central issue: it's impossible to know when the newspaper won't disclose its owners.

I have a personal stake in this story. I don't want to pretend that doesn't exist. It's what also gives me a really deep understanding of the issues and what's at stake. It's why I care and why I've bothered to go digging and to ask the questions.

Press ownership matters. We are in a time of danger. And news organisations are falling like skittles. Guardian's corporate structure - two boards, no effective governance - has enabled an executive leadership to make a series of decisions that, I believe, has unforgivably compromised its journalism. Whether those decisions - the deals with OpenAI and Tortoise Media - were the responsibility of the CEO, Anna Bateson, the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, or others, I don't know. But it's the editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, who needs to answer these questions. She's failed in her most important vital role: to protect her journalists and defend the Guardian's journalism.

Not for the first time. Maybe I'm channelling my own trauma from my High Court trial here. It's perhaps why I'm so reactive to what's happening: secret deals with Silicon Valley companies, oligarchic power, shadowy moneymen. I don't just know this stuff in my brain, I feel it in my cells.

The press is under a coordinated, global assault and I write this as a critical friend of what remains of Britain's independent media: do not, in the historian Tim Snyder's words, obey in advance. Stop doing dumb shortsighted self-sabotaging deals, stop thinking tech companies will save you, they never have and never will and answer the sodding questions when journalists put them to you.

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PS. There's one more piece of information that the filings threw up. This one is for my colleagues who remain at the Guardian. Skip to the end if you want to get the fun video. But what Guardian journalists won't know, because the management never told them, is that the Guardian took a large undisclosed financial stake in Tortoise Media before the transfer of the Observer took place.

Tortoise's annual accounts show the company took £2.7million in convertible loans before the transfer. In the same period, Guardian News & Media acquired 382,096 shares in the company. These were dissolved on April 22 last year, the day the Observer transferred ownership. On that same day, the Scott Trust - Guardian News & Media's owner - acquired 803,640 shares.

It suggests that Tortoise Media needed a substantial cash injection to survive up to the date of the transfer. It raises a question over how much the Scott Trust actually invested, whether it was the £5m announced previously or more. And for my union colleagues who negotiated terms for their departing colleagues with the Guardian and Tortoise Media, they did so not knowing that the Guardian was already a major shareholder in Tortoise Media.

The Guardian and Observer declined to answer any of my questions in relation to this deal.

PPS: If you're a media investor or foundation that supports independent journalism, our crew at the Nerve would love to talk. Last weekend, our all-female new media start-up partnered with the brilliant independent festival, the Laugharne Weekend in the tiny, magical Welsh town where Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood. Thanks to our amazing columnist Stewart Lee for bringing us on board and the festival's organisers Richard Thomas and John Williams for welcoming us in. There's a flavour of it here.

Thank you to everyone who came. Would love to see you there next year if they have us back xx

Thank you to everyone who supports my work. You're the best xx

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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The brand is chaos. That's the defining quality of everything that Donald Trump is doing. It's also the state of our information system. They're both marked by the same absence of rationality, order, logic, rules and signposts to the future. We are living in an eternal present, an unending scroll of news, videos, cats falling off logs, bombs blowing up apartment blocks and perfectly smooth foreheads speaking at the camera as they narrate the narrowest of world views.

There is no sense to be had in a media landscape that both mirrors and enables the political turbulence we're living through. We're trapped inside this never-ending algorithmic scroll where our dopamine-fuelled lust for the endless new is Trump's literal foreign policy. In three months, we've careered around the world in his wake from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran. Next stop Cuba.

I'm writing these words, after a gap of silence, because the last thing I wanted to do is to add to the noise. And I can't presume to try and help make sense of what's happening in the world for anyone else when I can't understand it myself. And I don't see how anybody can. The chaos we are living through is the equivalent of cognitive assault. Our extra-sensory information landscape engages our frontal lobes in the busyness of mental processing from which no meaning comes.

Three weeks ago, the news cycle stopped briefly on a subject that for a brief moment was shocking even in spite of this algorithmic numbing. The dazzling glare of public exposure shone a light on a global network of rich and powerful men, many of them household names, who had participated in, or turned a blind eye to, an international trafficking operation involving hundreds of women and girls. For the briefest of moments, it felt like a sharp blast of daylight had been shone on one of the darkest corners of our world. There was no path to justice or accountability for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but there was some small comfort in that at least, finally, it couldn't be ignored.

How wrong can you be? Of course, it could be. The news cycle hasn't just moved on, we are now deep into the testosterone zone, the fizzing, almost sexual excitement of war. This is what the early stages of all wars look like. Pumped up officials walking stiff-legged to podiums to tell the waiting press about the incredible potency of their firepower. Videos of fighter jets commanding the skies. Mesmerising footage of high-tech "intercepts" across the night sky. Spectacular explosions among dense tower blocks, all of it so familiar from any video game while a constant parade of interchangeable military men, analysts, commentators pontificate across our screens.

This was what was on the White House's social media accounts three days ago. A hyper-masculine meme-ified fantasy of war.

But there's another even more dangerous fantasy at play because this is a war that is being waged with a new generation of AI-guided missiles. What's happening in Iran is a step-change. Gaza was the laboratory, this is the next stage. Reporting from 972 magazine in 2024 revealed the Israeli military were using an AI programme, Lavender, to find and profile targets. And last week, the WSJ and Washington Post revealed that the US deployed AI at scale. It reports the US military is using the "Maven Smart System" built by Peter Thiel's Palantir and powered by Anthropic's Claude to profile and select kill targets. Or as this excellent piece by the Citizens sums it up:

"The same logic that built recommendation engines and social media algorithms is now being applied to the industrial generation of kill lists. Chatbot systems that entered public life writing emails, summarising documents and telling you what to have for dinner now help determine who lives and who dies."

Three weeks ago, details of Peter Thiel's relationship with Epstein came tumbling out. A social, intelIigence and business relationship that saw Epstein invest $40m in Thiel's Valar Ventures and, with the former Israeli PM, Ehud Barak, co-invest in an Israeli surveillance firm, Carbyne. This week, news of Palantir's involvement in the US's and Israel's war of choice saw its stock price rise 15%.

Was it AI that selected the Iranian school where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children? Investigations by three major US news organisations - the New York Times, CNN and Reuters - have now concluded the school was hit by US bombs. Reuters identified a "double tap", two strikes, 40 minutes apart. The open-source investigative site Bellingcat yesterday published a report that reviewed verified footage and identified the missile which hit the school to be a US Tomahawk. That report has now been independently replicated by the New York Times.

I grew up in Wales and felt the chill every time we passed a road sign to "Aberfan". My dad would recount the story of the day a coal tip fell on the town's school killing 144 children. The name of Aberfan is still burned into the nation's collective memory more than half a century on. But the slaughter of an entire community's children in the town of Minab in a single day? It's an obscenity that's caused barely a ripple of anguished outrage.

We now need to know: was AI involved in targeting this school? This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination? We all know how unreliable these large language models are. We've all been served a bullshit answer based on a fabricated link. Now apply this to war. We can't let this moment pass. Minab, like Aberfan, is a place that should be burned onto our brains.

AI, like war, is another hyper-masculine fantasy of God-like power. It's nothing of the sort, it's just a story, a myth, that's being imposed on us by a self-interested cohort of unaccountable men succoured by a pliant and incurious press.

But not here. Not in this newsletter, not on the day after International Women's Day, not in the midst of a new illegal war that the US and Israel have started and that Britain is being press ganged into joining by a right-wing media that's using Trump's words as if they were evidence of anything other than an out-of-control megalomaniac.

Forget Andrew Tate, this is the real manosphere. One whose edges we can't even see because we're living inside it. Our world is controlled by these men, their platforms, their alliances with nation states, technology-fuelled political power which is only accelerating and gathering strength. When I coined the word "broligarchy" it wasn't as a cutesy pun: I used it to describe the confluence of Silicon Valley technologies and US state authoritarianism, and a warped toxic pseudo-masculinity that's at its heart.

Andrew Tate is simply a phenomenon that is downstream of this. He's a visible excrescence that's a byproduct of this phenomenon, nothing more than a boil on the backside of the broligarchs. Two weeks ago, in the midst of the Epstein revelations, I read Gisèle Pelicot's autobiography ahead of what was going to be a last-minute interview with her. It's an astonishing story of almost superhuman resilience but it also forced me to confront yet another bleak dystopian consequence of our brave new digital world. The multiple rapes Gisèle Pelicot survived were only possible because a technology platform enabled her husband to connect with other rapists - at least 72 of them - in a 50km radius of their small French provincial town.

What do you do with that information? In the pre-internet age, would all those men be rapists? I don't believe so. Their desires were normalised by algorithmic forces beyond their control and an opportunity was presented by a platform that offered anonymity and impunity. It fed them a fantasy of God-like power and control: possession of a woman who literally couldn't fight back.

You don't want to face this. None of us do. It's too dark, too bleak. But to understand what is happening now, in Iran and Lebanon, and the forces behind it, we need to see that this is a continuum. Dominique Pelicot and Andrew Tate and Jeffrey Epstein are only symptoms. They are the doorway through which we can understand the forces behind not just another catastrophic Gulf War but a global power structure in which state violence, commercial profit and the control, domination and violation of women are inextricably entwined.

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For those of us old enough to remember the despair and helplessness we felt at the outbreak of the last Gulf War, it's impossible to avoid vivid flashbacks from that era and one figure in particular: Tony Blair.

On Friday night, a story dropped in the Daily Mail that claimed Tony Blair had "rebuked" Keir Starmer for not backing Trump.

The comments, it was said, were made at a private event where Blair was quoted as saying.

"The American relationship matters. It matters particularly today. It's not a question of whether it's this president or that president. If they are your ally and they are an indispensable cornerstone for your security... you had better show up."

If the British people had a vote on who would be the very last person they'd like to hear from now, I suspect that there would be a landslide for Tony Blair. He led us into the disastrous war on Iraq and he's never expressed guilt, contrition or doubt.

But his rhetoric is exactly what the united ranks of the right-wing press have been saying since Trump and Netanyahu began this war. They've been making cheap political capital about the UK government's reluctance to facilitate an illegal war they weren't even warned about. (Bookmark this paragraph for when the war reaches Britain's shores and Keir Starmer is also to blame.)

This tweet by a political commentator and member of the House of Lords sums up the hyperbole and jingoism that's characterised the last week.

But Blair also throws a helpful light on what else is at stake here and who else is involved. Because Tony Blair is not a free agent or simply a mouthpiece for the opinions of Tony Blair. Tony Blair's entire project - the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - is bankrolled by Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, the technology company that's front and centre, alongside OpenAI, in the great AI bubble boom. In Britain, Blair has to be considered an unregistered lobbyist for Larry Ellison. He's received in the order of half a billion dollars from him. Blair may very well believe everything he says with every fibre of his being - it's likely part of the reason Ellison hired him - but Tony Blair's financial interests are also squarely Larry Ellison's financial interests.

And Larry Ellison's financial, commercial and now ideological interests are not Britain's or even America's. Larry Ellison mostly acts in the interests of Larry Ellison. But as I laid out in this investigation for the Nerve - Ellison, a Trump donor and ally, is also tightly bound up with Netanyahu - his good friend and sometime holiday companion. And both Blair and Ellison are front and centre of the plans for Gaza, Blair as a member of the absurdly named "Board of Peace" and Ellison as one of the technology companies that stand to control and profit from the grotesque plans for redevelopment.

Tony Blair is a way to understand the forces at work in this latest war. A confluence of US and Israeli state, technological and commercial interests that all stand to gain. That Blair's views are being channelled into the UK press as it cheerleads for Britain to join this war without this disclaimer is yet another point of failure.

Though that's as nothing compared to the power over the US press and media which Larry Ellison now wields - through his son, David Ellison, a nepo baby in the mould of Succession's Roman Roy. Ellison's purchase of CBS has turned it into a state propaganda outlet and with the proposed buyout of Warner Brothers, CNN and HBO Max are next in line. He's also acquired a majority stake in the US company that now controls TikTok.

This consolidation is being reported in the US as a business monopoly story. Hollywood Reporter and Deadline have carried quotes from Hollywood types saying they think it'll be fine because David Ellison likes movies. But this isn't about who controls the Harry Potter franchise or even the CBS newsroom. It goes beyond even the creation of a state-aligned propaganda machine with one central point of coordination across multiple news and media brands. There's a far bigger strategic power play at work here, the Trump-Netanyahu alliance that's behind this latest war.

And Blair is the key that helps unlocks this. The takeover of the US media is part of the same power players behind the "Board of Peace", an organisation owned and run in perpetuity by Donald Trump, that's been set up not just to rape Gaza but to replace the United Nations with a wholly illegitimate pseudo authority.

Whatever else we do in this moment, it cannot include listening to Tony Blair.

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Gaza is the blueprint for everything we are seeing right now. There are no words to describe what happened there. And yet, it's happening all over again. Last week, Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, told reporters that Beirut would be Gaza-ified. "The southern suburbs will become Khan Yunis," he said referring to one of many Gaza communities destroyed in the Israeli assault.

Israel has ordered half a million people - a tenth of Lebanon's tiny population - to leave their homes, in the middle of Ramadan with nowhere to go.

Forced displacement of a civilian population is a war crime. But then it's all war crimes. On Sunday, it was reported Israeli commandos disguised as Lebanese soldiers - a war crime - killed 41 civilians - a war crime - because they went looking for the body of an Israeli airman shot down 40 years ago. What? Even his wife called out the IDF for the madness of this operation.

The failure to focus on the victims, to treat them as humans, amid the complacency of the western media, the vested interests of political class and the chaos of our information landscape is a refrain we've heard before but Iran firing back has changed the equation. Today the price of oil is shooting up, the world's supply of sulphur is literally going up in smoke over Tehran and a JP Morgan analyst in the Wall Street Journal called the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, "not just the worst-case scenario…an unthinkable scenario."

Jeffrey Epstein never got to pay for his crimes. Netanyahu and Trump have so far gotten away with theirs. But the rest of us may not. Actions have consequences. And we may be living with what the US and Israel started last week for many years to come. There's no roadmap to "victory" or even how this ends. Over the weekend, it was reported that the US had deployed its nuclear command or "doomsday" plane to the Middle East.

When I googled the village in Lebanon, the Israeli commandos shot up, I realised I knew it, or at least I'd been there many years ago, tracking down a vast stone monolith from when I lived in the country back in the 90s researching the first post-war guidebook.

I loved Lebanon, a beautiful, tragic, fascinating, corrupt, clannish, sophisticated, endlessly charming country that's been blown up by armies and marched over by militias time and time again. On Thursday night as the bombs on Beirut started to fall, I saw a post on Twitter from the Royal Albert Hall of someone singing Fairuz's hauntingly beautiful lovesong to Beirut. It's a song that I endlessly heard in taxis and cafes and I'm leaving you with a cover version of it from a young Lebanese singer from 2019 when Lebanon was going through one of its periodic tumults because Lebanon's resilience is like Gisèle Pelicot's, super human, inspiring, against all odds.

Shame has to change sides, Pelicot says. And maybe that should apply not just to rape and sexual assault but to war crimes too. Shame on the men - the broligarchs and their accomplices - who've brought this war to pass and to every technology company, politician and media outlet that is dancing to their tune. We can't stop them but we can expose them. We can name them. We can at least try and make shame change sides.

Thank you for everyone who supports this newsletter. It's hugely appreciated, thank you. Do leave a comment if this strikes any chord with you, Carole

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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Today, I'm republishing my entire post from one year ago. Please read it. It was my attempt to state clearly what the US press was not: that the US was in the grips of a coup. And that if coordinated action was not taken fast, it would be too late.

It's not that there wasn't excellent reporting in the US press. There was. But there was a total absence of simple, bold labelling of what was actually happening. The major US news organisations could or would not call it what it was.

The event that triggered my nervous system was Elon Musk's DOGE illegally entering the US treasury and gaining access to the entire nation's personal and financial data: a system-level hack on the entire US population.

This was a power grab that could not be undone. Data is like a genie. It cannot be put back in the bottle. That one act - that was then replicated across the federal government - was the beginning of what I believed, still believe, is a technoauthoritarian state.

I also channelled the voices of key experts: historians of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Tim Snyder. They also said it loudly and clearly: it's a coup.

It's important to mark these moments, I believe. It's one year on. And this week, it's become distressingly clear that everything these historians have been warning about then, have warned about for nigh-on a decade, has now happened.

Thank you to everyone who commented on that and shared it.I never imagined it would meet with such a heartfelt response from so many people.

This week I was invited on Democracy Now, an indie American news station that punches well above its weight to talk about the Epstein piece I wrote and published here last week. I was blown away by the response to that piece and I just went to find the YouTube link to the show and I'm blown away again by the response to the interview: it's reached 1m views in just a few days.

In the interview, I say that the extraordinarily muted response of the US media to the Epstein files is evidence that America is more broken than it realises.

It's the same problem I wrote about (below) a year ago. It's not that there aren't still incredible journalists doing excellent reporting, there are. It's that US news organisations lack guts and leadership. They're failing to frame and make sense of what is in the files and what it means, failing to spell it out in headlines, failing to give it front page real estate. And of course, above all, it's failing the victims who've been failed so many times before.

A year ago, it failed to communicate the jeopardy of those first days and weeks of Trump's administration, a fast and furious illegal blitzkrieg that laid the groundwork for a surveillance state rooted in violence that we now see ICE consolidating.

And I think it's the same problem in this moment. The US media is pre-surrendering, self-censoring. That's what the historian Timothy Snyder warned against. It was the first and most important point on his list of how to avoid the authoritarian backslide: do not obey in advance. Yet, here we are.

Half the press has been captured by Trump allies and what remains is cowed, unable to meet the moment, impotent in the face of the abundant evidence that's revealed a paedophiliac cabal comprising individuals from every major US institution from universities to banks alongside tech bro billionaires, foreign agents and the US president. A cabal that disgusts almost everyone. And yet, it's barely even troubled the front pages of America's major newspapers.

In the clip, I talk about morality. It's not a fashionable or much-used word in the media. But in a world in which lies replace truth and black becomes white, we need something to hang on to. A line that we do not cross. And that line, if it's anything, is surely the rape and abuse of children? In Europe, at least, that line is holding. The revelations in these documents have caused political noise and heat and actual consequences. A long list of scalps across Europe and in Norway, in the last few days, the former PM Thorbjørn Jagland, a prominent figure in the files, has been arrested and charged.

But America, it honestly feels like you are lost. Broken. Not any of you. Not the little people. It's your storied paedophile-adjacent institutions that are failing you. The people named in these documents are still running your banks, they're teaching at your universities, they make up half the government. Where is the outrage? Where are the thundering op-eds? I've seen better headlines in Reddit than I've seen in the New York Times. Even in class-ridden Britain, we've booted out a Lord and there is serious heat for a police investigation of the King's brother.

The frog is boiling. You're in the water so maybe you can't feel it. But Epstein needs to be your wake-up call. I spent last week genuinely baffled by the US media's muted non-response to the files. But now I realise: it's the dog that didn't bark.

The silence is compliance. And the conditions for the Donald Trump's coup to be fully executed are now in place. The mid-terms are the final test. But nothing is inevitable. There is everything to fight for. But stop and really listen. The dog that's not barking now? If it's not barking now, it won't bark then either.

If you're unable to call out a coup in progress, or the cover-up of an entire cohort of paedophiles and their accomplices in positions of power across every sector of the US government and economy, it's not going to be able to summon the scare headlines needed to prevent an illegal assault upon an election.

You need to build your own alarm system. Your own media. You need to find new leaders. The billionaires are not coming to the rescue, nor their news organisations or networks or their political candidates. It's time to build your own. The call is coming from inside the house.

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Feb 10, 2025

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn't need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation's most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called "Big Balls" - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn't take armed men, just Musk's taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country's digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States' most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That's a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn't the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people's personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I've completely lost it, please be advised that I'm far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn't mean this isn't not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren't eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what's happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk's illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d'etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it's business as normal when it's anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She's a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week's most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

"It's very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual.

I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy."

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: "Of course it's a coup."

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who've lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I've learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley's system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That's the model here.

Everything that I've ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It's just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It's not that what's happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

"So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they're playing a quantity game and assuming the system can't react to all this illegality at once."

And he's right. The system can't and isn't. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there's no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That's one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I've asked Mark to do the honours.

He's a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he's been participating in 'War Game' exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn't see this. It's even worse than they feared.

"Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions.

"So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?"

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That's the government body with the slogan 'We are the nation's first line of defense'. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful 'buyout' - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with "loyalty tests".

Musk's troops - because that's what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they've known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens' data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it's out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt's what it's possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It's a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook's actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was "Move fast and break things". That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk's career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I'm repeating this, but it's central to understanding both the mindset and what's happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The "cost of doing business".

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who's been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

"Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d'etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he's doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now."

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I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined "Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab". It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, "programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness." It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There's another word for an "Executive Power Grab", it's a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is "business as usual."

Over on the Guardian's UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump's Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren't seeing what's happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn't even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn't yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I'm wrong but it seems pretty obvious that's what Musk's Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren't headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that's before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that's going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US's membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we've done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we're on but there's no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

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We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it's always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn't that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It's both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It's a weapon that's already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There's much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It's not. It's rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It's hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It's going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that's been in Musk's sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It's how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn't happening? Really? That's the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It's a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica's illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company's VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I'm telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I've spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I've done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it's all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It's what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn't. And I've learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I've thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won't necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I'd be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I'd also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that's the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

With huge thanks as ever and solidarity & support to friends & strangers in the US, Carole

PS: I rang Mark Bergman to get him to do a longer version of the note. It repeats some of the one above but it's an added extra in case you want to hear more…

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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TW: Sexual assault and rape

This is not the piece on Jeffrey Epstein that I was going to write. I've struggled with that article all week. On Monday, I plunged into the three million-plus files which the Department of Justice dumped onto the internet a week ago and immediately surfaced a dozen or so gobsmacking emails that hadn't then been made public. (Many of them now have, but not all.)

By Tuesday, I had a scoopy piece almost ready to publish…but I've been unable to finish it. I have, to be perfectly honest, been overwhelmed. Some of the key stories it reveals are areas that have been my specialist interest for years. The Kremlin. Silicon Valley. MAGA and the European far right. Israeli intelligence. And there, slap bang in the middle of it is a man who I'd never wanted to pay any attention to, Jeffrey Epstein. Not only are they all connected. Epstein connects them.

So many of the names in the files are subjects of long-standing interest: Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Oleg Deripaska, even Peter Mandelson. It's a gold mine of new evidence and connections and revelation after revelation. What I also realised diving deep into the mid 2000s to 2010s, is how I repeatedly almost crossed paths with Epstein.

I was drawn to some of the same milieus: not the island, obviously, but Moscow and especially Silicon Valley. I had the same curiosity about the disruptive new technologies that were emerging: cryptocurrencies and web 2.0. I even went to the same tech conferences.

I am still going to write that piece, it's sitting half-finished in my drafts, but it's been weighing on me in ways that are both obvious and submerged. One of the most popular insults used against me by both right-wing commentators and people who should know better was to call me a "conspiracy theorist". Well, guess what. This more than anything, I've ever written sounds like a conspiracy theory. It's just a criminal rather than a theoretical one.

There's been something else that's been holding me back. It's the geopolitics that's fascinated me, the files are like a door you didn't even know existed suddenly swinging open. But there's another subject in there that's manifestly Epstein's core interest, a subject I've covered, that underlies so much of my reporting, that I've both tried to expose and found myself hard up against: power.

And yesterday, I realised the first piece on Epstein I wrote has to tackle what I believe is the overwhelming revelation of the files. It speaks, I think, to our inability to even see the edges of this story, let alone process it. It's not just the rampant misogyny that oozes from the pages of these documents. Women as chattel. Women as objects. Women as objects of both hate and desire.

It's darker than that. Because it's something that we do not want to see, that we cannot comprehend, that's as sickening as it's pervasive.

What Epstein shows us is that we live in a paedophiliac culture.

It's not just Epstein. That's what these files reveal. Epstein is communicating with hundreds of men in these millions of pages. Men from every country and power structure: US finance, petrodollar royalty, Russian oligarchy, Hollywood, Palo Alto, Washington, Westminster. We know that more than 1,000 women and girls were trafficked and there are hundreds of Epstein survivors. As well as those who tragically didn't survive, such as Virginia Guiffre. We must keep them front and centre, always.

Epstein was a criminal. Whether any of the men named in these files are too is not something we can know: no charges or prosecutions have been brought. But it's not just Epstein. That's what we now have to realise. Obsessive, pervasive sexual interest in teenage girls - and to some degree, boys - is threaded insistently through our culture.

We just choose to ignore it. We redact it. It's a darkness that we cover with more darkness.

Are we going to reckon with that? Can we?

What percentage of legal porn features "teens" or "barely legal" content? I asked ChatGPT moments ago. I got no answer. "This content may violate our usage policies," it said. There's a prudish veil of respectability that Silicon Valley maintains even while most tech platforms derive a huge percentage of their profits from sexual interest in children.

Porn represents 1/4 of all internet searches and according to Pornhub, "teen" is the most searched-for term. Meanwhile, OnlyFans exploits a market for sexual content that from teenagers posting adult content at one minute past midnight on their 18th birthdays.

We all reacted with disgust to Elon Musk's Grok non-consensually undressing women and girls, but at least we knew about it. Musk had made it visible rather than as it is on most platforms politely hiding it just out of view.

Not all men are paedophiles, obviously. Very few are. But our culture eroticises teenagers for money. Our technology finds, exploits, amplifies what maybe passing impulses. It monetises them. In the dark corners of the internet, the recommender systems do their work. Instagram, the "safe" social media platform? Facebook's own internal documents show that it connects paedophiles to children.

We don't want to know. And/or we've forgotten. A friend commented earlier, "We all knew who the pervy teacher was at school." It's true. Ask any teenage girl or anyone who's ever been a teenage girl.

We block that out as we get older just as Google blocks the predictive text for porn terms in its search box. And that's why Epstein is not a 'scandal', not a news 'story', not a black redacted hole where we know Trump's name should be, it's us. It's our world. The culture we live and breathe but pretend not to see.

The question is: will we now?

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Instead of finishing my Epstein article yesterday, I found myself googling a piece I wrote twenty years ago. It's from when an editor sent me to spend a day at Club 55, a legendary beachside restaurant in St Tropez, for a jolly travel feature, that took an unexpected turn.

There, I describe how I met:

"A sixtysomething Englishman called David Hamilton. That's David Hamilton as in 'you've probably heard of me - the photographer'. I nod. 'Sounds familiar,' I lie, although later I Google him and find that he is quite famous. But I'll come to that in a bit."

The article is mostly mid-2000s celeb spotting - Paris Hilton and Tamara Beckwick - and skewering myself as David makes a point of telling me how unattractive and over the hill I am. All while he gives me a 'who's who' rundown of the crème de la crème of the Cote d'Azur. I also witness an endless line of men come over to talk to him, many of them asking to buy his photography books. "'You promised me, David!' says one. 'We want five copies of the book and five of the catalogue.'"

Then, during a lull in the conversation, I ask if he has any of his photos on him and he digs a book out of his bag:

Contes Erotiques it says and the first few pages are Seventies-style soft-focus nudie shots of women with flowers in their hair. I flick on, though, and realise they're not women. Strictly speaking, they're girls, arranged in erotic poses, all looking moodily at the camera. The breasts get smaller and smaller until they disappear completely and I'm staring at a photo of a naked prepubescent girl. 'That's the one the Venezuelan wants to buy,' says David, looking over my shoulder and chuckling. 'Oh yes, they all like the girls. What about you? Did you have a Romeo when you were young? Hmm? Hmm? Was there some big amour? Were you ravished?'

I hand the book back. Later, I Google him and discover he is 'the most successful fine-arts photographer of all time', but a month ago a man pleaded guilty at Guildford Crown Court to possession of indecent photographs, including some of Hamilton's.

The piece is from 2005. Eleven years later, a French television presenter, Flavie Flament, accused David Hamilton of raping her when she was 13 years old. Three other women came forward to say that he had raped and sexually assaulted them too. Days later, the Guardian reported he was found dead in his Paris home. "Police reported that a bottle of medication was found nearby, and declared that Hamilton, 83, had taken his own life."

It hadn't occurred to me before writing this paragraph to look David Hamilton up in the DOJ's Epstein database. But, of course there he is. The references are tangential but he's there, nonetheless. In a series of emails, Epstein seeks, insistently, to buy an original David Hamilton photograph.

In another, a redacted correspondent sends him a link to an article about Hamilton's death. There is no comment, just the link.

In a third he's corresponding with a 15-year girl who tells him about the fun party she just went to.

We know she's 15 because her name wasn't redacted (I've chopped it off the screenshot). But then, that's par for the course for these documents: only the men's identities have been diligently obscured. So here I am. Not writing about the FSB-trained government minister who Epstein repeatedly emails and various juicy revelations and connections that I could have scooped the mainstream outlets on.

Instead, I'm writing about David Hamilton, an (alleged) paedophile I once met, 21 years ago.

But I think that's the point. The revelations of the Epstein files are, I believe, momentous. (And if you're reading this in America, I have no idea what your press is doing, the New York Times, in particular, has been wholly missing in action.*)

Epstein has given us an extraordinary portal through which we can now see how hostile state influence, criminality and the impunity of the billionaire class are intimately enmeshed. That's the piece I still want to write. But we can't understand any of this until we realise that Epstein isn't just a doorway, he's also a mirror.

His culture is our culture.

In the UK, a press and political pack is providing a release by baying for the blood of Epstein's "best pal" Lord Peter Mandelson, but it's also a way of letting ourselves off the hook.

This was the second last paragraph of my piece in 2005:

"This incident more or less sums up my feelings about the Côte d'Azur, Paris Hilton, Tamara Beckwith, big fat yachts and fatter millionaires. Where's F Scott Fitzgerald when you need him? He's dead, that's where, and in his place there's only Heat and OK! and Hello!. There's only pap shots of people getting on and off yachts, and falling in and out of their bikinis. There's only arms dealers and nudie pics of young girls. It's all fabulous-fabulous right up to the moment you scratch the surface and something sleazy oozes out.

Today was not the first time I've googled David Hamilton in the 20 years since. I understood that he was a rupture, a chink. That's how I discovered he was an (alleged) child rapist who'd committed suicide. Though Hamilton in common with many predators had already told me exactly who he was.

He also told me that a culture which reveres female youth and innocence despises female age and experience. It disgusts them, scares them. That's our paedophiliac culture too; misogyny of adult women is the opposite of sexual desire for girls, an inverted mirror.

We are crones, hags, witches. Because we're a threat. Because we see these men for who they are. Because, except for rare exceptions - the monstrosity that is Ghislaine Maxwell - we are protectors. Of children. Of society. Of a world in which rich men don't get to act with impunity. Not on our watch.

In 2005, I played David Hamilton's insults for laughs. Later, those same lines became weapons used against me by the men I investigated in the course of my work. A fire hose of abuse, amplified at scale by technological tools, in what I came to understand - in my rational if not emotional brain - was a massive, relentless coordinated online operation. It was designed to depress and deter and deject me. And it did.

But I was also just another woman online who had it coming.

Epstein's world is our world. That's the darkest revelation of these files. He wasn't an aberration. He was our culture made flesh. A culture that's now encoded into 1s and 0s and is growing exponentially baked into the algorithms that power our social media platforms, replicated at scale and fed into the large language models that Epstein's friends are building which are powering our future.

Epstein was a paedophile. And this is Epstein's world now. We're all living in it. It's just that some of us knew that already. That, I think, is why my words wouldn't come this week. And why other women I know have struggled too. A dark shadow has been exposed that we already knew was there. And in a world in which brutal authoritarianism is the rising political system and the world's superpower is led by Jeffrey's friend, the possibility of justice for the victims - any victims - this week feels bleak.

Epstein's victims, Trump's victims, Russia's victims, Israel's victims. We are in mafia country now. A world of strong men where the rules-based order is dead. Jeffrey Epstein is the symbol of that. And, we now know, he also helped create it.

If you've read this far, thank you. Without this newsletter, I wouldn't have written this, and if I hadn't written it, I wouldn't have understood it.

We can fight back. We have to. But first we have to see it.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work, Carole x

PS. Seeing is believing. Not all of the latest emails have been processed, but if you haven't seen it an incredible open-source team (thank you Luke Igel, Riley Walz and team, you rock.) They've put all of the emails and documents into a mirror of Gmail…that they've called Jmail. It shows you the emails as if you are Jeffrey Epstein logged into your own Gmail account and makes it so much easier to search than the DOJ site:

There's even Jflights and his Jamazon accounts.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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This is a quick newsletter to republish a piece that I've just written for Press Gazette, a UK-based trade mag for the media industry. I've been trying to write a complicated piece about Epstein for the last four days and what the files reveal about his relationship with the Kremlin and Silicon Valley and hopefully I will get that out tomorrow. But I've distracted by some distressing news in my world of journalism and I wanted to post about it here.

Yesterday, the Washington Post announced it is "laying off" 300 journalists, ie sacking them. It's devastating for the individuals, for the Washington Post, for America and, given that so many of them were foreign correspondents, the world.

Last night, I saw a deluge of tweet after tweet from brilliant and dedicated Washington Post journalists, editors, photographers. From the war reporter sacked while in a war zone:

To the reporter whose job it was to track Jeff Bezos's business interests:

To Pulitzer prize winners:

And many many more.

This is entirely down to the actions of Jeff Bezos, a tech fuck boy* who's completely surrendered to a would-be dictator. His decision to not endorse Kamala Harris and then cleanse the opinion pages of any dissenting views caused a collapse in reader revenues. Now, his whipping boy, Will Lewis, a Brit schooled by the OG of the political-media dark arts, Rupert Murdoch, has purged the news organisation of its most vital resource: journalists.

(*Am pleased with this new term, feel free to "broligarch" it up.)

This is a bloodbath. The purging of 300 journalists from one of the most important news titles in America is an incalculable loss.

This kind of institutional knowledge and infrastructure has been nurtured over generations. And now it's gone. The DNA of Watergate has been passed down to the present generation of journalists. During Trump 1, it coined its "Democracy Dies in Darkness" slogan and did the hard yards of trying to hold the administration to account.

What I can't actually believe it has the barefaced gall to still have that phrase on its masthead though I liked this take from the Reductress, titled: The Washington Post Lays Off Half Its Slogan.

I bashed out a series of tweets when I saw the news because I know exactly how these journalists feel: sad, betrayed, angry, uncertain what the future holds. It's exactly what happened to us at the Guardian less than a year ago. In our case, it was down to the actions of an unaccountable executive management team but the effect was the same.

Anyway, I expanded that out today as a letter to the 300 sacked journalists for a piece for Press Gazette.

I'm going to reproduce that below. And underneath that I've pasted the Nerve's latest deep dive into Peter Thiel's Palantir.

But I've interrupted my other work to write about the Washington Post because the attack on press freedom is central to everything we see happening right now. It's not a coincidence. Trump's US coup is already in its advanced stages. And what is very certain right now is that the billionaires aren't going to save anyone. But journalists can and must save themselves and the one thing that I wanted to communicate to Post journalists is that they are not helpless.

I've experienced not just an attack on press freedom, but a direct assault. For a long time, it was all I could do to survive it. But that's also how I learned how to fight back. And that's the number one point I want to communicate right now. I wish their colleagues still in position would take collective action while the US still has labor laws that mean anything at all.

As I write in the piece, the experience of going on strike was foundational to what we did next step in setting up our own news outlet. Action is agency. And while I'm sure there will be big ticket efforts to start something new from the wreckage of the Post funded by big league Democrat funders (I certainly hope so),but my message is that you don't have to wait for the cavalry to arrive (not least because they may not come).

When this happened to us at the Guardian, I spoke to a lot of clever people about my next journalistic step. The no-brainer step for me, they said, was to focus on this newsletter and "build out" a brand. Instead, I took another route of joining forces with other journalists - experienced editors and a designer - because I still believe that journalism is a team sport. And you have to start somewhere.

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Dear Washington Post journalists,

Solidarity on a terrible day. A craven tech bro has sold you out.

The Post is a symbol, both for journalism and America, and for Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis to axe 300 of you in a single day, including those currently reporting in war zones, feels like an augury.

But as a journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years and who, alongside my colleagues, was binned in a similar fashion less than a year ago, I have important information to impart: do not give up.

When our management decided to dump our beloved newspaper, The Observer, we, as a news organisation, fought back: we went on strike. We didn't win - a board of mainly non-journalists led by a banker saw to that - but we went down fighting. It isn't over until it's over.

One week after 100 staff and freelance journalists were "banged out" of the Guardian's offices (an old Fleet Street tradition, don't ask), we started planning a phoenix project. What if we set up our own news outlet? Was that even possible?

[The Observerwas taken over by Tortoise Media Group in March 2025with at least 20 staff taking redundancy and many other long-serving freelances and casuals, including Cadwalladr, losing their jobs]

We were inspired by a crop of insurgent new outlets in the US (Zeteo, Drop Site News, The Contrarian, 404 Media, Status) and the UK (Byline Times, DoubleDown News, Declassified, Mill Media). And, also by the sense of agency that came from going on strike. Standing in solidarity for the journalistic values we believed in and having a laugh in the process was the genesis of the idea for what became The Nerve.

What if we could try to do journalism in a different way? What if we didn't have to ask permission? What if we could persuade a community of readers to build a new kind of journalism with us?

"We" are three senior editors. Jane Ferguson, (the former editor of the Observer New Review section), her deputy Sarah Donaldson (who's leading the project), Imogen Carter (another senior editor), The Observer's former creative director Lynsey Irvine and me, an investigative journalist and writer.

At the time, we assumed we needed money and investment. That's what everyone told us. Especially as I was the only writer and we had ambitions: for meaty investigations, for public interest reporting, for reviews by great critics, and to pay the paper's two most popular columnists - Stewart Lee and Philippa Perry - who'd elected to come with us.

But in the end we opted to simply just jump off the cliff. Our USP as a team is that we know how to execute - we've worked together for nearly 20 years - so that's what we did. The others invested their Guardian payoffs in the project and I was being supported by a Substack newsletter I'd hastily set up. We started with nothing.

It's why we chose the name, The Nerve, because you can't tell people to have nerve unless you can show it yourself. And having nerve we believe is the quality, more than any other, that's needed right now.

So, here's how it's going. We focus on what we believe are the three subjects that define our age: culture, politics and tech. We produce two beautifully curated newsletters a week, a website, thenerve.news, and a newly launched YouTube channel

We don't paywall but we offer membership benefits with live and virtual events.

We bust our three-month target in the first week.

We've landed several major investigations (a whole run of stories on a Russian spy ring, Larry Ellison's capture of Tony Blair and Palantir's dangerous enmeshment in the UK state).

We've published a pilot print product. Our Bluesky already has four times the followers (17,000) of our old newspaper. Our Instagram posts reach up to half a million people. We're paying for everything out of revenue. We've now received grants from two incredibly generous philanthropists to support our expansion into video and public interest investigations. And if we can maintain the same, modest rate of growth, we will be sustainable in a year.

For the number nerds: our monthly growth is in double digits. Our conversion rate (free to paying subscribers) is 12% - three times the industry standard of 3 to 4%. And the open rate of our newsletters is an incredibly high 60%.

I was a Guardian lifer. I would never have given up the reach of a global news platform. For the last decade, I have worked flat out to expose what I hope everyone can now see is a Silicon Valley-enabled global far-right insurgency. And what's mattered to me more than anything is for that work to have impact.

And here's the most stunning finding to report. Between the Nerve and my personal Substack - How to Survive the Broligarchy, which is just over a year old - I get up to 200,000 unique views per article. To put that into perspective, it's what the very best performing stories on the Guardian's website get outside breaking news.

We're only four months in and it could all go horribly wrong but speaking personally I don't care. The world is on fire. The entire media industry is a shitshow. And the only interesting, impactful thing to do in this moment, I believe, is to be bold and brave and to try something new.

What looks like "security" isn't. If a news organisation decides to dump an entire title or a broligarch can axe 300 journalists in a single day, it's not any sort of sustainable or reliable model.

You can't rebuild the Washington Post overnight but you can try. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform we use, put us on their media collective programme which includes paying for our monthly legal cover (in the US it also provides a medical insurance stipend). Mostly, we're excited and proud to be part of a growing independent network that's led by journalists and that understands why a free and independent press matters now more than ever.

To the battered and bruised journalists of the Washington Post, I have this to say: democracy doesn't have to die in darkness. There is another way.

Your ally in arms, Carole

PS If you do want to take the leap, get in touch: carole.cadwalladr@thenerve.news.

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Here as promised is the first piece I wrote on Palantir, last week for the Nerve. It was a deep dive into Palantir's contracts with the UK government and new revelations about its total enmeshment in the UK's critical infrastructure. It's not just our National Health Service and the Ministry of Defence but also, wait for it, our nuclear weapons.

Peter Thiel is now centrally involved in what is supposed to be our ultimate deterrent. What could possible wrong?

There's another piece I wrote last week which I'm going to come back to but one of the key points, for me, is that Palantir's enmeshment in the UK is not just a risk to us - although it is - it also makes us complicit in what is happening in America right now.

The UK is Palantir's second biggest customer. It's activities are subsidised by nearly a billion dollars of UK taxpayers' money. It's a betrayal, I believe, of the American people.

We made a deliberate choice with the Nerve to focus on the three subjects that we believe are at the heart of everything that is happening right now: culture, politics and technology.

And Peter Thiel, embodies how those three subjects are not distinct spheres any more more than any other individual alive: They are one and the same.

I'm going to leave that here because Peter Thiel is right there in the Epstein files too and I want to get my interrupted piece out. The big scandal that's roiled the UK press this week is the disgrace of Lord Mandelson who as well as being Jeffrey Epstein's "best pal" was also…drum roll…Palantir's lobbyist.

Keir Starmer made Mandelson his ambassador to Washington and when Starmer went to visit Trump last year, the only other visit he made was to Palantir's office. That visit resulted in a £240m "strategic partnership" between the UK Ministry of Defence and, you guessed it, Palantir.

That visit was raised in a question in parliament yesterday. And that's just the tip of decades-long iceberg.

The Epstein story is such a mess. I've been on the tech platforms-Russian interference-political manipulation beat since 2016 and it's always felt like a relief when there are big stories that I can simply ignore. Epstein has been one of those. But no longer. That's the piece I've been struggling to write. He's right in the thick of everything I've been investigating and trying to expose for the last decade. What an absolute headfuck this week has been.

If you know any Washington Post journalists you know or follow, do share this piece. There's no magic bullet right now and nothing can replace one of America's most vital news organisations overnight, but repeat after me: the billionaires are not coming to save us.

Thank you to everyone who subscribes. It's free but paid subscriptions support my work. With thanks, Carole

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. I'm now a co-founder of The Nerve, set up a year ago by five women journalists from the Guardian and Observer. This is my personal newsletter.

This newsletter is free to subscribe to but the paying members are supporting my continuing work. Thank you so much x

I've spent the last fortnight or so rolling my eyes at the news cycle but refusing to engage with it. I just can't. It's not AI that's out of control. It's the AI hype cycle. Some 50 years ago, the biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" to connote a unit of cultural transmission that could reproduce and replicate itself and by this definition, AI hype is one of the most successful memes of all time.

I've had to look away when Gen Z AI doomers are being interviewed on live TV as if they're the Delphic oracle by credulous so-called journalists. I thought the news cycle would eventually self-correct and some sanity would break out. But it appears not.

Every day brings a fresh slew of nonsense headlines. This was what I woke up to yesterday morning in the New York Times.

Though this is the tip of the iceberg. I just googled "NYT" and "rogue agent" to find this story and this is what it turned up:

These bros don't simply want to rule the world, suck up our national grids, drain our aquifers, re-write our laws to suit their purposes, they are also, perhaps most unforgivably of all, perverting the meaning of words.

These aren't "agents". They are "proprietary software". And they're "rogue" in the same way that someone breaking into a Prada store and making off with a load of designer handbags is 'rogue'.

Let's pretend that in this scenario no-one bothers to call the police. Instead, his mum issues a press release which newspapers across the world splash across their front pages in which she suggests global governments need to work with her to sort this mess out.

These "agents" are software programmes that run on proprietary code created by man not God. They do not have agency. They are not living Godheads. And they're not "out of control". They are badly designed malware. And all of this is possible because these companies are once again relying on a credulous press to do their bidding.

I cannot believe that we're still falling for their schtick.

I have so many things to say on this subject. But fighting against this narrative is to swim upstream. Even knowing where to begin is hard. Every day brings more vacuous articles, channelling more corporate propaganda that goes unchallenged across multiple media outlets.

More on that below but first a public service announcement. At 6.30pm BST tomorrow, Monday September 28 (1.30pm ET), I'm going to livestream a panel discussion I'll be involved in live from the Labour party conference in Liverpool. It's being hosted by the Citizens, the non-profit I co-founded in 2020, and Doc Society, the brilliant organisation that champions independent film. It will follow the screening of a short film directed by Marc Silver about Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, called #pinkhairdatawhistleblower

.What's insane is that this scandal is still ongoing. As my friend, the indefatiguable Jason Kint points out it's just paid $459m for a number of US states to release it from various Cambridge Analytica-related claims but there are still more to come.

But the point of this is a discussion on how we comprehensively failed to heed this warning. And especially so on the weaponisation of personal data. There's a particular reason for showing it now and doing so at the Labour party conference: everyone's favourite spytech firm, Palantir.

On the panel, alongside Marc Silver and Rebecca Stevens, of the Citizens, is Clive Lewis, a Labour MP who, perhaps more than any other, has led the calls for the government to end its contracts on Palantir. It's a live issue, right now, because Palantir's biggest contract - and its most controversial - at the heart of the NHS's data platform is up for renewal. This week sees planned protests in London. And yesterday, it was announced that Labour party members are trying to force a debate and a vote on the issue at conference.

We plan to livestream the panel here (you can also sign up here). If you'd like to watch the short film, there's a free Vimeo link here. (Marc is also the director of the excellent documentary Molly vs the Machines seen recently on Channel 4.)

And if you want a reminder of why we have to stand up to Palantir in the same way we have to fight fascism, it's because they are one and the same. Here's Peter Thiel on why it's better to be evil than to be bad. "Because you're at least getting something done." Really. Not even kidding.

The dude on the left is Mathias Döpfner, the owner and CEO of the German conglomerate, Axel Springer, and a long-time ally of Thiel. The interview was the prelude to an award ceremony last week in which Döpfner chose to honour Thiel with a special award and drafted in the Free Press's Bari Weiss to make the welcoming speech.

I characterised it on social media as a special suck-a-broligarch's-dick award but it's apt that Thiel decides to talk about Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus here because the entire tableau - Döpfner, Thiel, Weiss - is a media morality tale/dark triad tableau vivant.

Bari Weiss's Free Press was bought by Paramount Skydance, owned by David - son of Larry - Ellison, the tech bro billionaire behind Oracle. Weiss was promptly installed as the editor-in-chief of US network, CBS, which Paramount also acquired. Next in the line of fire is CNN and HBO whose parent company, Warner Bros, is on the cusp of being bought by Paramount. Meanwhile, in Britain, Döpfner has bought the Daily Telegraph.

I'm here, writing this today, because back in the mists of time, I got taken on as a Daily Telegraph trainee. Even then, it was unlikely. It's always been a Conservative paper that catered to the upper classes, landed gentry and aspiring Thatcherite middle classes and I was a comprehensive schoolgirl from South Wales who was none of the above. It's been through a whole series of dodgy owners (Conrad Black, the proprietor in my time, was subsequently jailed) and while Döpfner's purchase, yet another blow to Britain's beleaguered print media, is depressing, it's also curious.

Why Britain? Why now? Why this whole dog-and-pony show with the special suck-a-broligarch's-dick award? What does Döpfner need Thiel for? What does Thiel need Döpfner for? What kind of quid pro quo is this?

Palantir's relationship with the UK state - its second most important customer - is at a potential tipping point. (As is Britain's relationship with Israel, another joint Döpfner-Thiel concern. Döpfner tells his employees if they don't agree with his stance "We shall all be Zionists!", they should get jobs elsewhere.)

But what's most compelling is how this is happening at a particular moment in which Palantir's relationship with the British government finally looks like it might be hitting the skids. For an insight into how threatened Palantir is by the new Andy Burnham government, I present you with exhibit A:

Here's me with the #pinkhairdatawhistleblower (second left) and the then deputy leader of the Labour party at the Labour conference in 2018. He's the guy standing up making an impassioned point in front of the screen saying: "The Cambridge Analytica Files: data, scandal and democracy."

Fast forward eight years and Tom Watson is the data scandal. If you want to know what a rogue agent looks like: it's Lord Watson of Palantir. Watson stepped down as an MP and, as is routine in Britain, he was "elevated" to the Lords, the equivalent of the Senate if Senators didn't bother to stand for election and were simply gifted a paid sinecure for life by their mate, the President. America's dystopian future is Britain's actual present day.

Watson is now Baron Tom Watson of Wyre Forest, a lifetime position in which he gets a daily allowance, subsidised bars, his pick of any number of directorships and the opportunity to play an active and important role in the UK legislature. And, as of last week, he's also Palantir's latest hire. Step forward: UK Senior Vice President at Palantir Technologies.

This was my reaction on the announcement. I was genuinely gobsmacked by the news. How could someone go from Silicon Valley-data-surveillance-technologies-are-a-threat-to-democracy to pass-me-my-pay-cheque-please?

Watson wasn't someone I just sat on a few panels next to. I'd considered him an essential ally during those years. He actually "got" the story. And - appeared to - understand the ramifications.

The news didn't come totally out of the blue. Watson previously sat on Palantir's UK advisory board. Earlier this year, the Nerve published a comprehensive piece on the "Palantir pipeline" in which we found more than 30 senior government officials who'd been poached by Palantir from the highest levels of the NHS, Ministry of Defence and security services. Watson's name featured in the article and after mulling it for a bit, I decided to message him.

I would never normally disclose a private message. But given no British (or American) citizen has any reasonable expectation of privacy now that Palantir has access to some of our most highly sensitive personal data, I've decided to post it below.

Here's what data scraping looks like when the boot is on the other foot, pal.

You'll see my suggestion that if he is going to take the cash he should consider doing the decent thing and leaking me documents. That's a call-out to any Palantir employees, past and present. You know where I am.

Part of the reason why I think Watson "got" the story is because he'd played a key role in the parliamentary committee that held Rupert Murdoch to account over the phone hacking scandal. Watson was there leading the questioning on the day that Murdoch went to parliament which he described as "the most humble day of my life." (And Wendy Deng saved him from an errant pie thrower.)

He saw the thread of connective tissue between press baron Murdoch, data baron Robert Mercer and Silicon Valley baron, Mark Zuckerberg. It's all about power. For years, Murdoch's influence over UK, US and Australian politics was almost unassailable. Now, that influence has passed to Silicon Valley and Watson is sucking from its teat even as the broligarchs square the circle and buy up what remains of legacy media.

Anyway, here's a snippet of his introductory video. Most nauseating of all is his claim that he's going to tackle "propaganda" about the company. Or as we know it, "journalism".

I could go on. And on. My old newspaper, the Observer, is currently serving up AI propaganda on behalf of the UAE. As I wrote in a Twitter thread earlier, some will say there's nothing wrong with a slave state known for its human rights violations sponsoring tech coverage at Britain's oldest liberal paper. I'm just not sure Observer readers are among them. But nobody's asking them. And it's just yet another depressing data point on the whole tech bro-media baron convergence.

I leave you with the brilliant Cody Dahler who does very funny three-minute explainers of the news on Instagram. I moderated a panel earlier for the Nerve at the inaugural Kings Cross Vision Festival, on "Fighting Hate With Humour" with Deborah Frances-White who hosts the extraordinary Guilty Feminist podcast, a one-woman movement bringing feminism to the masses.

We showed Cody's AI Special in which - dammit - he coins the phrase, Silicunt Valley. I am so jealous. Anyhow, watch and enjoy!

*The petition he references here is actually a somewhat problematic tech bro solution to a tech bro problem but that's one for another day.

Thank you, thank you! And please share with anyone you think needs to read it. Looking at you Lord Watson…

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If you're a regular follower of this newsletter, you'll know that I've published two previous articles about Jason Arday, the young, black professor who was found dead after an academic with white supremacist views kickstarted a media feeding frenzy into both his professional and personal life.

In the immediate aftermath, I wrote a practical guide on what you can do if you see someone being subjected to a media and online pile-on. I then turned my attention to the astonishing lack of self-examination by the mainstream media in their own role.

That lack has only become more starkly obvious. And it's why, this week, I'm re-publishing an article that I believe deserves a much wider audience. Originally published in Mediapart, a French outlet, it's by a PhD researcher, Stephanie Lamy, who's an expert in online operations.

It's pretty long and somewhat academic but if you want to understand what actually happened - and crucially, how - it brings a significant new body of evidence to light. Lamy's expertise in online propaganda and the networks behind it reframes the entire story: she first contextualises the individuals who sought to discredit Arday, their motivations, their involvement in a far bigger right-wing "race realist" network, its long-term strategic goals and how their framing shaped the entire media storm. And, crucially, it still does.

It's not that proper journalistic processes weren't followed: they were. But by accepting ideological framing, the reporting laundered the claims from their original ideological source and, in doing so, independently legitimised them.

That's the frame. And Stephanie's piece busts it wide open.

In Britain, there's been only the slightest and most superficial of responses from mainstream outlets to criticisms of their coverage. They've cited "public interest" and "responsible reporting" and there has been no honest or critical self-reflection. What Stephanie Lamy painstakingly reveals is that the lack of expertise into how these networks allowed the press to become unwitting accessories to the bad faith actors who acted as part of a co-ordinated network. Their object was to destroy Arday. And ultimately, they succeeded.

What I've tried to convey in my past articles is a visceral sense of what it's like to be trapped inside the airless bell jar of right-wing propaganda. I've come to think of this as a sort of narrative entrapment, a paralysis that stems from being imprisoned inside someone else's telling of your story from which there's no escape. In Arday's case, even now, these narratives are going unchallenged. Centrist and apparently neutral commentators are still defending the media scrum by referring to Arday as a "fabulist" and "fantasist". Anyone rejecting it is a "leftie" or an "activist". They have made no attempt to understand the bigger picture, their own role in it or the chilling reality that these racist, eugenicist, white supremacist networks have won an information war that we're still refusing to even acknowledge.

Maybe it's a stretch but I've found myself thinking about George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", his famous essay about how, as a police officer in Burma, he felt pressured by an expectant mob into shooting an elephant.

There were sound "public interest" explanations that Orwell could have cited. He could easily defend his actions as "responsible" policing. The elephant had previously killed a man. "Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant," he says. And yet, he knows it's wrong. He realises he's become part of a system of power and oppression. And the act of writing about the elephant and his killing of it is his acknowledgement of the corrosive and corrupting effect of that.

We didn't shoot an elephant. We helped kill a black man. And unless we can acknowledge that, we remain in hell, trapped inside the same airless bell jar of right-wing propaganda, our reality framed by racists. The job of journalism is to expose power. Instead, we've been co-opted by it. And now? We're seemingly too embarrassed to admit our mistake. Read Stephanie's piece and make up your own mind. Whatever you think of it - and do feel free comment below - bear in mind that all of this this is, and should be, up for debate. And then ask yourself why it it's not?

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Stephanie Lamy is a researcher, feminist and expert in influence operations. Former Secretary-General of Internet Without Borders, she is the co-founder of Danaïdes.org which develops and deploys technology for civil society organisations operating in conflict and crisis environments. A PhD candidate in political sociology at the Institut des sciences sociales du politique (ISP), Université Paris Nanterre, she also teaches in the Master's programme in Governance of International Relations at Sciences Po Toulouse. She is the author of Agora Toxica: Uncivil Society in the Internet Age (2022), on how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilise and undermine democratic societies, and La Terreur masculiniste (2024), an investigation into masculinist radical milieus, their ideologies, networks and use of violence as a political strategy. Both are published by Éditions du Détour.

By Stephanie Lamy

Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda. Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. The hunt that led to Jason Arday's death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination - or power over knowledge - operates. And who helps normalise it.

From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Arday, the Black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August 2026, was being subjected to racist and ableist harassment — exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described. Arday had been marked as quarry long before the fatal media pile-on. An openly race-science and immensely well-funded international network enabled its hunters to unleash the pack: to give the pursuit scale, reach and political utility. But to break out of the margins of race science, the chase had to become something else. Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story about scientific and journalistic integrity.

The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, they adopted it, running with the hounds, and, in doing so, legitimised both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists.

The hunt for Professor Jason Arday began quietly, three years earlier, couched in the civilised codes of scholarly society: a professor who was merely asking questions.

In May 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, began examining Arday's publications. Arday's appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge had made national news: at 37, he was the youngest Black professor in the university's history.

From the moment he arrived at Cambridge, Arday was targeted by Freedom of Information requests. Harris's actions did not come out of nowhere. What he set about doing was already an established playbook in the US. But the focus on Arday marks the moment when this set of practices was trained on a UK academic. In the United States, Christian nationalist organisations opposed to teaching and research drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) — which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through law and institutions — were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to use public-records procedures to target academics and then identify — or manufacture — misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of the academic far right's repertoire, aimed particularly at researchers who examine power relations, but also at those whose very presence — whose perceived identity — appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

The largely covert campaign against Black scholars also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first Black president, came under heightened scrutiny against a backdrop of misogynoir. That campaign was led by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation — both Christian nationalist organisations. Rufo is a key character in this story: he is one of the principal architects of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against Gay into a broader political offensive against minority representation in American institutions.

What connects Rufo to what would later come for Arday is not only the method, but also the network.

Rufo did not act alone. He is at the centre of a powerful and well-resourced network that includes a race-science-focused online magazine Aporia. Rufo promoted it and appeared on its podcast in 2023. Research by the anti-fascist organisation HOPE not hate identifies Aporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), a Wyoming-registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, the American eugenics organisation established in 1937. Byline Times reports that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder: tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's Documentary Foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Cofnas, the race-science researcher who would later propel the allegations against Arday to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emil Kirkegaard had met Peter Thiel in 2019. According to Kirkegaard's own account, Thiel subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers; Kirkegaard named Cofnas and Noah Carl, Aporia's editor. Both have been run out of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism.

This network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by Spectator associate editor Toby Young, who has himself advocated what he called "progressive eugenics". Aporia's Noah Carl is a co-director of Skeptics Ltd, the publishing company controlled by Young, while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufmann sits on the FSU's advisory council.

The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive-industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's Bastards, racialist theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to naturalise inequality: social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for the authority religion no longer commands, and intelligence-obsessed techno-masculinists with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek to uphold, or even reinforce.

The day Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $10,000 fund for "plagiarism hunting" at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt to his campaign to defeat what he called "racialist ideology".

"Plagiarism hunting" reconfigures legitimacy: promoters of the junk science that is race science reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power.

By June 2024, Black academics were describing the climate in their universities as "open season".

So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May 2023, Arday received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged his published work. When Arday did not reply, Harris wrote again. On the 11th of May, Arday eventually responded, accusing Harris of spending hours combing through his work "looking for mistakes". He told him not to contact him again: "Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment." citing a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved.

Harris replied anyway. Arday had explicitly asked him to stop, but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behaviour, treated the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing: the self-appointed investigator of Black academics could recast himself as a guardian of merit, simply a man of learning asking questions.

With no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martyn Hammersley, Professor Emeritus of Educational and Social Research at the Open University, who has a history of wild claims about feminist stand-point theory, a social science framework that critiques traditional male-biased approaches and prioritizes women's lived experiences. His grievance is what he regards as the influence of "activist" research on the social sciences and the diversity of view points.

On the 19th of May 2023, Hammersley wrote to Hilary Cremin, Head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, the university's Head of Research Policy, Governance and Integrity, setting out allegations concerning Arday's 2018 paper in Social Sciences. Cremin then met with Arday and the faculty's Director of Research. Arday agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 21st of June 2023, Cremin told Hammersley that Arday retained the faculty's "full support". Morgan separately informed him that, because the work predated Arday's employment at Cambridge, the university did not consider an investigation to fall within its remit.

Hammersley escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a "systematic investigation" of Arday's other publications. Cremin did not respond. The chase then spread beyond Cambridge: Harris and Hammersley contacted academic journals and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded Arday his PhD.

Harris and Hammersley also harried Arday outside university channels. As early as 2023, Harris contacted Jack Grove, a journalist at Times Higher Education (THE), drawing his attention to the correction to Arday's 2018 paper. THE did not investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another unnamed professor contacted the publication about Arday's work. In Grove's own account, Harris supplied him material that extended far beyond Arday's publications to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities and personal biography. By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached Arday for comment not only on his work, but on his private life. From Arday's reported comments, he experienced this as a continuation of the harassment he had already identified: the man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now enlisted journalists for the hunt. Harris is on record acknowledging Arday's complaints of harassment and that he had cited a previous history of harassment.

It's important at this stage to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Arday's 33 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in Social Sciences was amended in December 2023, with additional references and clarification of its relationship to earlier work; the paper in Educational Philosophy and Theory was corrected in May 2024. Neither was retracted. By the time THE began its investigation in 2025, both matters had been closed. When the allegations eventually reached Arday's PhD, Liverpool John Moores University found citation defects but cleared him of plagiarism, concluding that they resulted from "honest and reasonable error", compounded by inadequate supervision relating to his learning disabilities.

It's also important to centre the story here. From Arday's standpoint, and by LJMU's own standards, there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Arday, for his part, consistently described what was happening to him as racist and ableist harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April 2026, in his British Sociological Association keynote, Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook, he described how Black academics were being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponised against them.

By then, Arday had already made public the very tangible effects of the campaign: racist abuse, threats and intimidation. In a July 2025 letter to Jacqui Smith, then Minister for Skills at the UK Department for Education, he reported a physical assault, death and rape threats against himself and his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he likewise described "targeted campaigns driven by racial animus".

In fact, the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable "concerned academic" — a variation on the "concerned parent" or "concerned citizen" routinely mobilised to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality and public-health measures — while Arday became the eccentric young Black professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were re-coded as aggression through the classic mechanism of DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender — first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freyd.

The reversal drew on the myth of the "perfect victim". Inaccuracies in Arday's autobiographical narrative, as well as unprovable facts, were used to discredit his testimony: if he was not beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all — and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically white and male elite institution, credibility, merit and belonging became entangled. The racist trope of the threatening Black man did the rest: Arday could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper with something to hide.

But for the reversal to take hold, it had to be made public: DARVO works by manipulating how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th of August, as Arday resigned from Cambridge and lost the institutional protections that came with his position, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) — an anti-DEI organisation — revealed that Arday had reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), framed Arday's resort to the police as a threat to academic freedom.

Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher Education helped publicise the same reversal. Jack Grove published his account under the headline: "I was reported to police over the Arday case. I was just doing my job." Arday's complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter-Ruck, the London firm specialising in media and defamation, were later portrayed as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arday's attempts to protect himself from harassment became a threat to press freedom. This framing left little room for Arday's lived reality: even if his response may have seemed excessive, it came after years of reported racial harassment, threats and intimidation directed at him and his family.

On the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks on academic and press freedom into a single conspiratorial narrative, casting Arday as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics: "In a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Arday tried to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic."

This threat-frame survived Arday's death on the 14th of August. That same day, THE published an opinion piece by Ian Pace — an advisory-board member of Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF), who campaigns on "institutional neutrality" and "academic free speech" alongside Cambridge professor and Reform UK Head of Policy James Orr. As Byline Times has documented, Orr is himself a key node in the same network: Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge through him around the time of his appointment, while Orr later helped bring the race-science publication Aporia into organised national-conservative politics. Pace argued that the Arday affair demonstrated "the danger of treating criticism as injury".

Three days after Arday's death, THE news editor Tom Williams maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Arday by Grove, was "justified".

The chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumours circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels. The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right fringe on the 21st of July 2026, when Nathan Cofnas, the race-scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. That claim is unverifiable.

Three days later, The Telegraph — to which Free Speech Union founder and General Secretary Toby Young regularly contributes — brought them into the national attention with a title "Cambridge's diversity poster boy in plagiarism row". The Times and Daily Mail followed that same day. By the 1st of August, when The Guardian published its investigation under the sensational headline "Plagiarism, playbooks and a pig's head: new claims surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday", the story had become a national media affair, still oriented by the race-science network's framing.

Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced a new investigation into Arday's qualifications and career, citing "new information". Arday resigned later that day, saying that the "relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary" had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved.

The scrutiny had to be of Arday. Not the pack. The Guardian article subjected Arday's accounts of racist harassment to minute scrutiny, going so far as to check some of them with police and witnesses, and finding discrepancies. But the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris — the quarry, the chase, the context — was entirely absent from the story. Harris briefly appears in the story as a concerned academic. The article subsequently was amended to refer to Dr David Harris being temporarily stripped of his professor emeritus title.

But Dave Harris's own history should have complicated his portrayal as a neutral source. For example, it is publicly available information that, in May 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marjon following a complaint alleging "harassment and bullying". Harris maintained that the dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He was reinstated the following month, although the rehearing upheld a finding of misconduct and issued him with a formal warning. In a video published after Arday's death, Harris falsely claimed he had been "cleared".

This history should at least have alerted The Guardian to a possible recurring pattern of behaviour. Arday had pitched the story directly to The Guardian's arts and culture editor, which helps explain how it arrived on his desk. Recognising the wider operation, however, would have required to look beyond individual claims - that yes, perhaps were suspect. But this would require an editorial decision that this was no longer a story about Arday's academic record or personal life. It was potentially a story about a coordinated ideological network using allegations of academic misconduct to contest academic authority and freedom. That is the point at which expertise in influence operations might have changed the investigation.

Furthermore, Times Higher Education accounts repeatedly conflated civility with integrity. Harris's correspondence was described as notably, even excessively, polite, as though civility of tone guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times Higher Education's Jack Grove recalled his first email in his August 5th account as "softly phrased". By then, Arday had already asked Harris to stop contacting him and reported him to the police. When Times Higher Education resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly described the anonymous professor who contacted him as "almost apologetic" about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, while the repetition and escalation of approaching THE — the very conduct Arday had identified as harassment — disappeared from view.

Two things can be true at once: a harasser can also be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Tavia Nyong'o have argued, civility operates as a "covert political aesthetic" and a "rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries of access to politicity": it helps determine whose speech and conduct are recognised, in the first place, as legitimate political participation. Harris's "softly phrased" manner helped make him legible as reasonable: measured, rational and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct.

That veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy — a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of academic standards — positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed to scrutinise Harris's own track record. In its lengthy investigation published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris's pursuit and quoted Arday explicitly asking him to stop, yet did not frame that conduct as harassment. Nor did it mention that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from concerns about academic standards. Instead, Harris was given space to complain that "bloody awful work" could get through when standards were relaxed for special issues devoted to "'activist' issues like racial inequality". Harris's own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor was his sustained campaign against Critical Race Theory treated as activism.

The very man denouncing other people's work as "bloody awful" had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. In April 2025, internal Plymouth Marjon correspondence described publications produced "in the Marjon name" as "poor quality and often controversial" — a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological assessments of Critical Race Theory. His resulting critique of CRT was self-published in March 2024, rather than published by an academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a generic endorsement from Martyn Hammersley.

Concerns about the poor standard of Harris's research had already been public knowledge since January 2026, when The Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjon's decision to suspend his emeritus status. In that article The Telegraph explained the university's assessment of the publications produced "in the Marjon name" were "poor quality and often controversial". Although The Telegraph framed Harris as the injured party — an academic "'stripped of title' after critiquing Critical Race Theory" — the information was now in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing his credibility when the Arday allegations resurfaced in July.

Between the 24th of July and Arday's death on the 14th of August, The Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Arday. It even ran a box headed "How The Telegraph's reporting led to Jason Arday's resignation". After his death, the newspaper quietly altered the headline "Jason Arday is living proof that you reap what you sow", removing the word "living".

Meanwhile, the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from The Telegraph's website — the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source.

What felled Arday was not the action of isolated actors, but that of a single, well-connected and well-financed pack with a not-so-secret plan.

In 2023, Nathan Cofnas laid out a roadmap to power on his Substack, "How to Take Back Academia". He was not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions tend to look very similar. "There are two ways to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus: remove them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been pushed out of academia for political reasons.".

The two-pronged approach - eliminate the Black scholars, platform the "mediocre" white males - is apparent with the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his emeritus status suspended in January 2026, he became a cause célèbre in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) rallying to his defence. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also defended Nathan Cofnas.

When Emmanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Cofnas's affiliation on the 5th of April 2024 following his writings on race, heredity and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with Attenborough personally promoting his case. Cofnas later stated that FSU chief legal counsel Bryn Harris assisted his appeal. The FSU subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute to his legal fund; the FSU itself says it has supported Cofnas "throughout" and helped him bring legal action against Emmanuel College.

In March 2026, Attenborough, now at CAF, intervened on Cofnas's behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist demands that his appointment be rescinded. Cofnas had been recruited to Ghent by Bouke de Vries, whose own work on intelligence and "dysgenic" fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024, de Vries also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human Diversity Foundation co-founder Emil Kirkegaard. De Vries had already sought university funding to bring Cofnas to Ghent for a lecture in February 2024, just days after Cofnas published A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, before later hiring him as a postdoctoral researcher on his Liberalism's Fertility Problem project.

So when on the 21 July, Nathan Cofnas published "DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge" on his Substack, the architecture of uncivil society actors to simultaneously scale the harassment initiated by Harris, as well as give cover to the attackers was already in place. So was the framing.

Cofnas heavily promoted his blog entry on X, where the post exceeded one million views. It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the American race-and-IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual milieu as Curtis Yarvin.

A foundational figure of the anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the "Cathedral" to describe what, in secular societies, he presented as a new Church: a decentralised system made up in particular of universities and mainstream media, responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made refutation almost impossible: if academic institutions rejected race science, that rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership in the "Cathedral". Discrediting academic knowledge production on race while recasting hereditarian race science as censored truth fitted directly into this logic.

By the time the first national newspaper articles appeared three days later in The Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail, Cofnas and those amplifying his narrative had already transformed Arday into a symbol of the supposed corruption of universities by DEI: a "DEI star" whose alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal the consequences. Brought to bay, on the 31st of July, Arday submitted to an interview with The Times to defend himself against the allegations. But by then, the media pack was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to NewsCord's verified corpus, 52 articles about Arday had appeared by the time his resignation statement was published on the 5th of August.

Arday's resignation did not stop the hunt, because the actions of the victim have no bearing on the level of harassment. It stops when the harassers stop — whether because they move on to another target or because institutions and bystanders intervene. And if the prey is isolated, the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his resignation and the moment he was found dead on the 14th of August: 214 through the 13th, and eight more that day before his death became known. In all, NewsCord records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of July and his death.

Of those articles, my own mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors with links to the FSU — 19 of them after Arday resigned. Twenty-one appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder Toby Young is associate editor and columnist; another was written in The Telegraph by FSU-linked Allison Pearson, and another in The Times by FSU chair Nigel Biggar.

Rather than a media pile-on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each individual claim is true or false. It is first and foremost a struggle over who has the power to define reality. That is what framing does: it places certain perspectives at the centre, relegates others to the margins, and determines what becomes visible, sayable and relevant.

That authority — that power — is precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system fundamentally untethered from reality, needs to be received as science. Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it. Without recognition from journalists, universities and the public, they remain what they are: marginal and extremist. With it, they acquire the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge — to decide what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance.

And Arday was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture that authority: a young Black professor at Cambridge, with a remarkable life story, working on racism, sanism and inequality. Make him doubtful enough, and he can be made to carry the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on racism is itself suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism structures the academy are precisely the people who do not belong in it. You do not have to prove the whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving.

As defence researcher Olivier Schmitt, now Research Director at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College, has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into "systematic doubt". "I'm just asking questions" then becomes a posture through which suspicion can be kept moving, alive indefinitely, even in the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of critical thinking.

Arday did not have to be proved a fraud. He only had to be made permanently suspect. And with him, everyone who looked like him.

But the hunt could continue only as long as the pack kept running and the hounds baying.

Arday's mass harassment on social media was participatory; for some, the serialisation of revelations discrediting him became collective fun. Harass-tainment. Adam Serwer, the American journalist at The Atlantic whose work examines race and American politics, captured this political pleasure in collective humiliation in one phrase: "The cruelty is the point."

For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided impression that their contribution would "protect science" somehow. Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies collective sensemaking, has shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative: they participate in investigating, producing and circulating the material that sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself, to check another supposedly outlandish claim, to uncover another discrepancy, was particularly enticing to those who defined themselves as rationalists or sceptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the issue back to reality of harassment, and thereby establish ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination. That reward helps explain why, even after Arday's death, so many of those who engaged with the steady stream of revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable to let him go. Even the reasonable minds.

Kate Starbird has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies "not [in] better facts, but better frames". Arday was hounded to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives: a frame centred on the feelings of cisgender white men who believe themselves to be being greatly replaced from the institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Arday's own perspective out of view.

On 20 August, six days after the kill, Ghent University suspended Cofnas as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation into conduct that, in part, predated his post about Arday. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports and concerns about his conduct and public statements, and their impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, of using his position and Ghent affiliation to pursue and promote his "race realism" and "hereditarian revolution", despite having been hired to work on "the future of liberalism". The university regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a misuse of its institutional reputation and a conflict with its code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation. This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case.

Cofnas immediately recast his suspension as censorship, an attack on his freedom of speech. The experiences of his racialised colleagues disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very architecture of actors implicated in the hunt, but now with an american dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him its Opinion pages to consolidate the frame: "How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair." "My university suspended me," the article declared. "All I did was tell the truth." US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White then reproduced the free-speech frame, pressuring Ghent to reinstate Cofnas and warning that "all options" were on the table as the United States reviewed its relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra De Sutter — a trans woman and former Green Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium — then became the new target onto which the same frame could be transferred.

Within days, an open letter opposing the "punishment of a whistleblower" in the person of Cofnas attracted more than 800 academics, among them actors embedded in billionaire-funded Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium, for example, signatories Florence Bergeaud-Blackler and Xavier-Laurent Salvador lead back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin who funds Salvador's Observatoire du décolonialisme, while his Périclès project funds Justitia, created with the Institut Thomas More in Belgium. The latter collaborates with Bergeaud-Blackler and is linked to the Observatoire de la Petite Sirène (OPS), a French transphobic organisation that fuels campaigns against trans rights and participated in Belgium in the offensive against EVRAS — relationship, emotional and sexual education in schools — a disinformation campaign that fuelled mobilisations culminating in demonstrations and school arson attacks.

The Observatoire du décolonialisme has since expanded its remit, becoming the Observatoire d'éthique universitaire. The organisation intervenes in academic controversies in the name of "academic freedom", opposition to "censorship" and scientific integrity — a function comparable to that of the Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom. And, like the FSU, it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate in particular through the neo-secularist cluster around Le Point, Marianne, Franc-Tireur and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media such as Le Figaro, Causeur, Valeurs actuelles and Atlantico. Added to this is christian nationalist's Vincent Bolloré's media apparatus: CNews, Europe 1, JDD, and others.

But Bergeaud-Blackler and Salvador are not the only French signatories. Martine Benoit, Jean Fichot, Andreas Bikfalvi and Charles Ramond have, like Bergeaud-Blackler and Salvador, signed initiatives organised by Vigilance Universités, a collective founded in 2016 to combat what it describes as "racialism", "communitarianism" and attacks on universalism in higher education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering: the dominant groups' identity anxieties and the objectives advanced by Christofascist networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into the language of universalism, secularism, science and academic freedom.

Nathan Cofnas has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work - albeit remotely and pending investigations. But he's is only a cog in a well-oiled machine: the one who looks the part. Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, strategic litigation and "concerned academics", allowing the same politics of white cis male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality. A very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim to be.

The hood is not what makes the racist; sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognise. And race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood.

The onslaught against Jason Arday was not inevitable. It became possible because, at every stage of the pursuit, people and institutions — the police, universities, the media, the commentariat — chose to ignore his warnings, legitimise the frame and amplify the reality imposed by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not simply follow the hunt: we handed them the trophy — the power to define what is real.

To overturn that frame, to take back the power, we first have to lift the hood. Collectively name what is wearing it. That starts with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the front lines back to the centre, and listening when they sound the alarm. Jason Arday was afforded no such attention.

The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Professor of Black Studies at Columbia University, writes in The Nation: "This is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power—and to decide, on both shores, who is permitted to produce it at all."

The question now is whether we can recognise the hunt for power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom, or scientific concern — and refuse our assigned role in the killing of our democracies.

Lamy, Stephanie. "Mapping of Media Coverage of Jason Arday." Google Sheets, 2026

Thank you for reading Stephanie's piece and for your ongoing support of this newsletter, if you have any comments, please do leave them below, Carole

I haven't been able to shake the Jason Arday story since writing about it on Monday. The news that after weeks of being unrelentingly hounded in the press, an autistic, black, working class Cambridge professor had been found dead.

And yesterday, after a week of dwelling on it, I had a moving conversation with one of Jason Arday's childhood friends. In the hundreds of articles before his death and after, no-one had reported on the kind, gentle, extraordinary man he and his friends knew. I'm not going to go into that here or what he has to say about his close-up view of his friend's treatment by the press. That'll be coming out in the Nerve in the next day or so.

I wrote this newsletter before that conversation and although he fleshes out so much more of what's here, I thought it was worth putting it out first. Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Jason Arday wasn't the first person to have been hounded by the UK press and he won't be last.

We know that more certainly than ever by the response since his death from large parts of the British media class. I've been gobsmacked by the lack of humanity, by the knee-jerk defensiveness, by the silence from the senior leaders of these organisations. Are we just going to cover this up and move on? Really?

Have you noticed that it's already fallen off the news cycle? Is that because it's not newsworthy? If so, why is it still trending day after day on social media?

If a kettle had the same safety rating as the British press, it would be banned from sale. It's not just a potential death trap. It is a death trap. That's what this story tells us.

But what we're still failing to acknowledge is the extent to which Jason Arday already knew that. He knew exactly how black academics are targeted, he not only understood it to be a "playbook", he'd contributed to the literature on it. It was the same bad-faith process that had seen Claudine Gay, the first black woman to be president of Harvard, forced from her position. But she was not a one-off example and when Arday was asked to deliver a prestigious keynote lecture, it's what he picked as his topic, titling it "Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook".

That lecture title and topic is right there in the introduction of the Guardian article that marked an important turning point in the story. The day of its publication, August 5, marked the moment the story left the right-wing echo chamber, which Arday could rationalise and dismiss, and species-jumped into the wider media.

It was no longer a right-wing racially motivated witch-hunt. It was now a free-for-all, and this exposé that went beyond the claims of plagiarism to interrogate details about his personal life marked the moment.

Arday's friend Kehinde Andrews said that he'd asked Arday at the beginning how long he thought the media attacks would last and he'd said two days, three days max. It was already seven days in when this was published, one day after his friend, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a world-leading autism expert, said that he considered him a suicide risk.

It's the final sentence that's unbearable. Arday had an internal roadmap of where this led. He knew the stakes, the toll, the fall-out and the possible pathways.

I wrote a story, years ago, about a cluster of teen suicides in Bridgend, Wales, and in the process learned a lot about suicide contagion that's never left me. It's a powerful, poorly understood transmissible condition that collapses both time and space. It transmits down generations and across continents. It's an idea, a permission, an almost algorithmic-like pathway. Jason Arday's brain had already trod that path. It was a fact in the literature that he'd cited and footnoted. He'd already mapped the exit route that others in his position have taken.

This entire story is about shame. And maybe where you stand in your understanding of it is where you stand with your own relationship with it, with what is the most human emotion of all. Because we were all bystanders in the shaming of Jason Arday. We all witnessed in real time as he was ridiculed, mocked and undermined by an overwhelmingly white, middle-class academic and media establishment, many of whom come from generations of privately-educated privilege. Here was a black working class professor whose early life had been shaped by academic underachievement and cognitive disabilities being told, repeatedly, overwhelmingly, with no pushback from any quarter, that he wasn't academically and intellectually good enough.

In the last few days, so much new information has finally come to light, including this which I posted on BlueSky yesterday morning, by Professor Jason Stanley. He points out that academia has easily quantifiable metrics that he said no journalist had apparently checked.

Stanley pointed out if a journalist had checked those metrics and then compared them against other scholars in the field, they would have reached this conclusion.

The unassailable fact that Jason Arday was cleared of plagiarism by Liverpool John Moores, the university that awarded him his PhD, is even now, almost entirely absent from the reporting. But then that's because journalists haven't bothered to find out what academic plagiarism actually is, in Stanley's view:

Maybe he wasn't such a dummy after all? He wasn't "found guilty of plagiarism" as I read in one piece yesterday. And even some of the most sympathetic coverage is still calling him a "fabulist", a "fantasist", a "fraud". Because that's what the "responsible" "public interest" reporting told us. Yesterday's leader in the Economist, the leading article in one of Britain's most prestigious outlets, continued to mock the claims about Arday's marathon running which it claimed he did on a "broken leg".

Why would an outlet of this calibre and resource fail to fact check even the basics of this claim? The Guardian quote is with regards to a different claim, about the smear campaign and Arday never said he'd said he'd broken his leg. He said he'd kept running on a hairline fracture. And guess what? Long before he was famous, dead, an academic, accused of plagiarism, Cambridge's youngest black professor, he was just a local lad inspired to raise money for others, as an entire list of local newspapers reported at the time, and yet, until this week, were cited nowhere.

Middle East Eye has tracked them all down here. But why on earth did no-one do so before?

It's the punching down that's got me. The bullying. That hasn't let up since his death.

There are, of course, many thoughtful, intelligent, ethical journalists in Britain. But many are employed in news organisations that participated in the feeding frenzy, that failed in ways small or large. They are not free to speak out. And we're all guilty anyway. I consumed the Jason Arday coverage even as recoiled at it. But what I didn't realise, until late, was how suspect, how inadequate, how lacking the underlying reporting was. Commentators were feasting on partial, inaccurate, incomplete material.

And missing, from it all, of course, was Jason Arday. A day or two ago, I spoke to Hannah, my ex-partner's daughter, who had been affected by the videos she'd seen in her timeline of a gentle, smiling, beautiful man "who seemed almost too pure".

I was trying to explain to her why I was still so caught up in the story and she thought about it and said: "It reminds me of when I went to meet Alice Ruggles' parents." Hannah had a stalker in her 20s and two years ago, we made a BBC podcast where we'd tracked down the man behind it. Alice Ruggles was a girl who'd been in her class at school, who'd also had a stalker. In both of their cases, the police had failed them as they dealt with a terrifying situation outside their control. Hannah survived. Alice didn't. She was murdered by her stalker. The episode in which Hannah goes to talk to her parents is profoundly sad and moving. You can listen to it here.

The visit to the parents had given her a shivering insight into where this could have led. And maybe, that's what this story is for me. If I'd lost my defamation case, I would have been Jason Ardayed, I knew that. Just as, she could have been Alice Ruggled. We'd both survived but it wasn't a given.

And Hannah had been through the painful experience of reckoning with how her stalker had preyed on her, the private anxieties that he'd exploited and the shame she'd carried from that and locked away for years. And that's what Jason Arday faced too. A careful, skilled manipulative bully who knew exactly where to hit. That's what Nathan Cofnas, a white supremacist who set the story in motion, did. This piece in Byline Times lays out the race science network of which Cofnas is part and which their previous reporting had showed has made significant inroads at Cambridge University, a subject unreported elsewhere.

We know now how carefully planned this was. But there was so much in the public domain. Professor Jason Stanley was calling out Cofnas's eugenicist beliefs back in 2020 long before he got the Cambridge gig.

But the point I'm getting to is that the most hideous judgment of all is not delivered by your enemies, it comes from within: it finds a mark somewhere deep inside you, where it collides with the most damaging judgments you hold of yourself on your worst days. That's what shame is.

Maybe it's why I feel this story on a different vibration to some of my peers. As a middle-aged woman without the comfort and societal respectability of a nuclear family, I had different anxieties to Jason that were exploited and weaponised but no less painful.

I've had heat from calling Jason's experience a digital lynching but I know of what I speak.

To be clear, social media abuse is downstream from press coverage. It's not separate and distinct. All media is social media now. And it's not just why this is a story that's gotten so under my skin, Hannah points out. It's also the involvement of the Guardian. Its leadership has issued what amounts to a cease-and-desist letter of anyone questioning anything about its decisions and is now gaslighting Jason Arday's family and friends and anyone with a pulse who witnessed this entire episode in real time.

Its silence and defensiveness is also exposing its reporters to harm, in my view. They're the ones with their names on the stories even though they have no power or control whatsoever over when or what is published. It's editors who make these decisions collectively. These stories went through many hands and the young black and brown reporters whose names are on them are not culpable for any unintended consequences and I really hope that they know that.

I especially hope that the necessary safeguards to protect them are finally in place inside the organisation. This was from just last year:

All news organisations - and universities for that matter - need a Chief Safety Officer. A senior executive who is also an expert in the hybrid threat landscape that journalists and academics navigate. Someone within the institution with the expertise to understand the complexity of the information landscape and the bad actors within it, and how disproportionately black and brown people, women and minorities are at risk.

They would ask the same questions about the people its journalists report on too and they'd understand the news reports don't exist in a vacuum. Mainstream media and social media are indivisible now, there's no Chinese Wall. A Chief Safety Officer would have sufficient power and authority to step in when, as I wrote in the last newsletter, a world-leading expert in autism, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, has publicly stated that the autistic man they are reporting on is, in his view, a suicide risk. Because at no point was Jason's neurodivergence, his autism, taken into account by, it seems, anyone at all though, as the writer, Will Self, who has two autistic children points out in a furious screed:

In 2019, I proposed the above to the Guardian's senior management. It was my version of a desperate cry for help. I'd just disguised as a dry, quite academic memo. It was never acknowledged, let alone acted on but at some point afterwards I was invited for lunch with my editor, a kind, humane, overworked man with no financial budget and limited power within the wider organisation to help me in any meaningful way.

As we were leaving, he told me about a threatening phone call he'd received. Someone critical of the paper's trans coverage had called his home phone and threatened his wife. The paper had made major mistakes in its coverage of the subject, as he'd be the first to admit, and he was unprepared for the ferocity of the backlash. "That's awful," I said. "I actually thought of you," he said. "I thought it was probably a good thing that I got to experience a tiny taste of what you've been through."

I so appreciated those words and they've stayed with me. If I had a magic wand I'd want all journalists to take a walk inside the Jason Arday Hate Machine in which I'd use AI to harvest their personal data, identify their inner weaknesses, and then blast personalised posts, articles, videos and tweets at them without respite. In this version, I'd have LLMs create stories that "ask questions" about their school records and their teenage sporting achievements. And I'd want them to remain in there, trapped, with no way out, for weeks, if not months. Though, as George Orwell knew, even two minutes of hate will do.

The lesson of the Arday scandal is that this could have been any of us, could still be any of us.

I mentioned my friend, Jess Search, last week. And I want to share her advice again, here, because maybe it will help someone in some way at some point when they need it most. But as we stood outside the court room on the first morning of my trial, I mentioned the shaming and humiliation that I felt so acutely was coming my way.

"Nobody can make you feel shame," she said. "It's what sexual survivors are told." It comes from within and it's up to you to decide whether you can and will be shamed. It's what I would have told Jason Arday. It's what Gisele Pelicot told the world, that shame has to change sides. Her resilience was truly extraordinary. But it's a semi-magical quality that some people have and some people don't and perhaps those who struggle most of all are people whose brains are built differently, like Jason's.

But shame has to change sides. It's the media's turn now. We cannot allow the witch hunt to turn on others and that includes young journalists of colour. But we, the British media should be shamed. Need to be shamed. How else do we prevent the next death?

I feel ashamed. Don't you? This was a collective failure born of the collective shortcomings of our industry that's a foundation of our collective information space and what we're witnessing in part is a collective refusal to acknowledge that it's been re-shaped by the Silicon Valley-owned platforms that create the incentives that unleashed a click-driven cruel and animalistic bloodlust from the most primitive areas of our brains.

It didn't just overwhelm Arday, but us too. Our frontal lobes, where we do our most complex reasoning, were hijacked. We lost our moral selves. This should be a moment of reckoning for the entire UK media industry and pretending otherwise is to gaslight his family, friends, the public and the very memory of Jason Arday himself.

Some people have suggested this is the press's "Milly Dowler moment", the day the nation recoiled in disgust when it discovered a murdered schoolgirl's phone had been hacked and sparked a public inquiry. But she was already dead. This is so much worse. Jason Arday was alive. And maybe he still would be. If it wasn't for us.

How to Survive the Broligarchy is a reader-supported publication. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. For more about autism & to donate to work supporting autistic people, the National Autistic Society is the UK's leading autism charity.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. I'm now a co-founder of The Nerve, set up a year ago by five women journalists from the Guardian and Observer. This is my personal newsletter.

How to Survive the Broligarchy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you!

This newsletter is called How to Survive the Broligarchy because it draws on my decade of experience of both reporting on power and being targeted for doing so.

On Friday night, the shocking news broke of the death of Jason Arday, a black Cambridge University academic who had found himself in the blast zone of an online culture war; an apparent suicide.

Over the weekend, there have been pieces in the UK press about Cambridge University's failures but almost nothing at all in the mainstream media about the mainstream media's failures or the role it played in his death.

Arday was autistic and vulnerable. His friend, a world-leading expert in autism, Simon Baron-Cohen, issued a public warning that he considered him at risk of suicide.

The media hounding didn't just continue, it increased.

I can't see any universe in which these titles will hold themselves to any sort of account. Because this is how culture wars work. The cultivation of targets that can be righteously attacked is the business model.

I wrote yesterday about the platform-enabled feedback cycle that fuels this.

The article the Times paid to algorithmically amplify? It's an anonymous account from a lone student who complained Arday gave her 70% for an essay when she felt she deserved 75%. It was published in UnHerd then republished in the Telegraph and Times and then pumped out to hundreds of thousands of people across different platforms.

This is what surveillance capitalism has given us. A recursive feedback loop that sees an ad team select a publication's most clickbaity articles that leads to an increase in traffic that signals the "public interest" aka appetite to publish more articles. It's a money machine.

I'm supposed to be taking time off but I'm here because there are ways to help someone who comes under attack. Arday wasn't the first and he won't be last. This isn't an aberration. It's a business model.

Even today, the Spectator is leading its site with a poisonous piece by Brendan O'Neill on the "tragedy of Jason Arday".

Last week, I wrote somewhat personally about my trial, and I'm going to refer to my own experience again because my practical suggestions are rooted in my lived experience. I went through a pale shadow of what Arday experienced but nevertheless I know many of these names who came for him, these "journalists", these outlets. Because it's same ones who came for me. Brendan O'Neill even used that exact same framing. I was a "tragedy" too.

It's hard to explain what it's like being at the centre of an online mobbing. I called it a digital witch burning, in my TED talk. In Arday's case, it's a digital lynching. These are online behaviours that map onto existing precedents, that draw on the same intolerances and historic prejudices. In my case, it was a misogynist witch hunt. In Arday's case, a racist lynch mob.

That's not hyperbole. I have chosen those words carefully. Sometimes we refer to "in real life" to signal the opposite of "online" but it's a false distinction. Human behaviour is now expressed in the material and virtual worlds. Both are real. They prompt real emotions, real consequences, real violence.

There's no such thing as "cyberbullying". It's just bullying.

And what I can't adequately convey is how paralysed you feel when the mob comes for you. How helpless. I went through a fraction of what Arday did and it was still, at times, overwhelming. I mean that in the most literal sense.

One of my lowest points came in October 2020 after the first hearing in my libel case, the "meaning" hearing. And I have to briefly explain what happened to explain what followed. The judge got to decide the "meaning" of 21 words I'd said in a TED talk - that a Brexit funder had told lies about his relationship with the Russian government. I still can't explain how on earth, he came to his decision, but Mr Justice Sani decided the words "meant" that I'd said he had illegally taken money from the Russian government. If you respond to that sentence with a what-the-actual-fuck, thank you. I felt like I'd gone mad.

It was utterly absurd. And it had profound consequences. It meant I had to defend the meaning of the words that the judge had come up with at my trial, not the actual words I'd said. And since I couldn't defend the judge's words, I had to withdraw my truth defence.

That triggered a whole sequence of events, an online and press shitstorm that went on for days. Articles in the right-wing press claimed that it "proved" I'd lied. That I'd "admitted" I'd made it up. That my journalism was utterly discredited. And every fresh article fuelled the online hate machine. The day this happened remains a dismal low point.

But what was far, far worse was knowing that it was only a warm-up for my actual trial. I knew if I lost, I would become a public humiliation spectacle. I wouldn't just lose my flat and my ability to earn a living, I would be hung from a digital tree as Brexiteers gloated and rejoiced.

It's the dread that got to me. It was knowing there was worse to come. I spent two years anticipating a full Ardaying.

I'm not recounting this for sympathy. Or to suggest that I have any idea of what Jason Arday experienced in the days before his death. But I can tell you about the feelings of despair and helplessness of being trapped in a false narrative that nonetheless gains purchase by repetition. There's no smoke without fire. Except there is. These right-wing outlets are smoke machines.

1. Send a private message of support. If you have a way of emailing or messaging someone being monstered, just do it. If it's an email, put your message in the subject line, so they don't even have to open it. I have a practice of sending a private message to anyone I even vaguely know if I see them being subjected to a pile-on. But you don't have to know someone, or agree with them, to see they are being subjected to unfair bullying. That message may never be seen or read but it's a small but meaningful gesture.

2. Send a public message of support. The intention of this targeted media bullying is to shame and humiliate the subject, to undermine their credibility, silence their voice, to diminish them. Every crumb of support matters. And it matters doubly so, if you're in the same or an aligned industry.

   I probably know the name of every journalist who publicly supported me, and it's not a long list. Even journalists I liked and respected, even some of those who I'd consider friends and allies, remained silent over years. There are multiple reasons behind this. Some fell for the right-wing narratives. And, as we saw in Jason Arday's case, the media turned on those who publicly supported him. They became a target too. But it's what makes it all the more important when people do show that support publicly. It has a psychological impact on the target, but it also acts as a small but significant brake on mob behaviour. It gives others the permission or confidence to break ranks and do the same.

3. Don't join in. There was a point in the Arday story at which it crossed into one of my specialist interest areas: legal threats against journalists. It emerged Britain's most expensive libel lawyers, Carter Ruck, had sent a letter on Arday's behalf to a journalist at the Times Educational Supplement who had attempted to investigate the claims. I considered commenting but it was already obvious that every aspect of the story had become fuel for right-wing and racist voices. It also wasn't clear, and still isn't, whether Arday organised that letter, or paid for it. I didn't speak up for Arday but I also didn't join in, for which I'm now thankful.

4. Advocate for others. One of the biggest lessons I learned was how impossible it is to advocate for yourself. It's not just exhausting, it also doesn't work. It sounds like special pleading or, worse, whining. It's like getting stabbed and then having to make a case for the police to investigate it when everyone's telling you that you had it coming. I learned the biggest lesson in how to do this for others from my friend, Jess Search. Her great talent was to not to ask if I needed help, or how she could help, she just worked it out for herself. From organising a legal crowdfunder to getting random acquaintances to show up at my trial.

   Jess tragically died much too young from a brain tumour and it was only after her death that I discovered that what she'd done for me, she'd done for dozens of other people too. She had a special gift. We can't all be Jesses but I do often think "What would Jess do?" And the answer is: something. Sign the petition. Show solidarity. In this case, complain to IPSO, the press regulator.

5. Ridicule them back. Before Jason Arday, there was Misan Harriman, a black artist who committed the crime of being black and having opinions. He's also, unforgivably, friends with Meghan Markle, talking of online lynchings. Earlier this year, he was monstered by the same outlets who came after Arday. In his case, they were actively trying to get him sacked from his role as chair of the Southbank Centre. And the Times is still using him in their racebait ads. It's a pattern.

   Many journalists won't criticise other outlets because you never know if or when you may need a new job. Celebrities and politicians know that it may make them the next target. Writers worry about their reviews. If you are a public figure and can speak up, consider doing so.

6. Change the frame. The man who started all this, Nathan Cofnas, is at the centre of a network of "race realists" and white supremacists. Not a single news outlet considered that worthy of investigation. Would it have made a difference? Not by the time the media shitshow was in full swing. But at the beginning? Yes, it absolutely would have. It's ammunition for people online to fight back with. It's why the absence of good reporting is as harmful as the presence of false reporting.

7. Bring in experts. Corporate communications and leadership teams need to understand what they're dealing with is a hybrid information landscape that's created new threats. Cambridge University didn't just fail Arday in his moment of crisis, it contributed to the crisis. Simon Baron-Cohen told the BBC that Cambridge's policy is that accusations of plagiarism are investigated by the award-giving university, Liverpool John Moores. In February, Baron-Cohen accompanied Arday to Liverpool for a hearing. He was found to have incorrectly cited the underlying work but the panel concluded this was an honest mistake. The work was credited elsewhere, just not in individual passages. He was cleared of the allegation of plagiarism.

   But at the height of the media storm, Cambridge University reversed its previous decision and announced its own investigation. If there was a single moment or decision that damned Arday, it was perhaps this. Baron-Cohen said that Arday felt he had no choice but to resign. What followed he says was a mental health spiral that culminated in Arday's death.

   On Saturday morning, I messaged Nina Jankowicz, an American disinformation expert, for her thoughts. She's written How to Lose an Information War and How to Be A Woman Online but she's also been the target of an extreme MAGA monstering after Joe Biden appointed her to a White House "Disinformation Governance Board".

   Nina's experience was horrific. She received threats of violence, had to move house, and much more. It affects her still. This is what she messaged back

   I worry about the many people who will undoubtedly make themselves smaller after this campaign of hate. The people of color, the women who will eschew a life that has any public component for fear of what might be unleashed on them. Even if dismal human beings like [Nathan] Cofnas don't succeed in literally policing academia or publishing, they may succeed in their campaign of self-censorship, unless institutions develop much more robust support structure for targets of networked harassment campaigns like this.

   That means:

   - Monitoring social media with an eye not only toward protecting the institution, but protecting its people.

   - Proactively addressing "scandal" before the narrative is set—don't wait for something to become front page news to respond. You aren't being clever by "not giving the campaign oxygen," you're just allowing it to fester and allowing the story to be written for you.

   - Providing physical security and mental health support to those under attack, including moving targets to safe locations, establishing regular check ins with mental health professionals if necessary, and generally being human and providing care. The last thing a person who is facing a networked harassment campaign wants to do is navigate bureaucracy to get the support they need.

   She hits the nail on the head when she says that the trite crisis comms advice to "not give the campaign oxygen" is hugely damaging. And in Cambridge's case, the reversal of their previous position appears to have put the impact on the institution's reputation above other concerns including the fall-out on their own employee.

   Anyone who is a "worker" under UK law has the right to minimum health and safety protections in the workplace. And there is nothing to suggest that Cambridge University took that obligation seriously. But then, few organisations or institutions understand how these hybrid attacks work, how to counteract them, how to protect the individuals involved.

   Nina understands that from her own experience. And I learned the hard way too. If your organisation does not respond promptly, it'll be too late. The standard corporate comms advice to "let it blow over" is hopeless when false and malicious information is circulating. Any social media policy that proposes individuals should "come off social media" is discriminatory: women and people of colour are disproportionately attacked online, you're effectively allowing a mob to silence them.

   If your organisation does not have a policy informed by someone with disinformation expertise and an individual who can act as an internal advocate for the person targeted, it's just not equipped for the modern information age. Time and again, institutions take on the narratives of the attackers.

   I couldn't get the help I needed at my organisation and I failed in my attempts to get them put in place subsequently. My warning to the senior management team was that the next target is disproportionately likely to be a woman of colour. I felt like I'd barely survived. My worry was - still is - that the next target may not.

   News organisations need to get their house in order but so does everybody else, academic institutions among them. Culture wars aren't a natural phenomenon. They're shaped by bad actors with agendas like Nathan Cofnas and enabled by the affordances of the platforms where we consume our information. These don't just find new audiences for old prejudices, they monetise them. This is the engine of the internet, its dark capitalist heart. And until we understand that, we are doomed to repeat this story over and over again.

   I leave you with this moving interview with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen that I've quoted throughout this newsletter. He talks about the kind, gentle friend that he lost. But he also talks, precisely, about the sequence of events that led up to his death. RIP Jason Arday. We failed you.

   How to Survive the Broligarchy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for your support, Carole

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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I adapted that headline from a post on BlueSky. Thank you, Scott.

Because the killing of an unarmed civilian by masked paramilitary gunman on the streets of Minneapolis is murder. This was an execution.

An extrajudicial killing in cold blood of a registered nurse, Alex Pretti. I dearly hope that's how it'll be reported but I'm posting now, even in the noise of this moment because the shock value is the point of it. That's what political violence is. It's violence for political ends.

We know the playbook of what comes next because we've already seen it. We know that the news cycle will erupt in shock and fury. And we know that the Trump administration and its allies will lie. They will tell us not to believe the evidence of our eyes and we won't know what to do with what is state-sanctioned gaslighting of an entire nation and beyond.

But, there are things to hold onto and that's what this week - maybe one the most insane news cycle of my lifetime - has also taught us. The noise, the sturm-und-drang of this moment is not a coincidence. It's the point.

This has been a week of explosions from destroying the NATO alliance to this fascistic street killing. It's meant to stun us.

Has it really been only a week since Trump announced his intention to take Greenland by any means possible? Three days since he said "I'm a dictator…and sometimes you need one." Two days, since a board of international war criminals were inducted into the new inaugural "Board of Peace".

And they are all tests. Trial balloons. Can we focus long enough to fight back?

What is happening on the streets of Minneapolis is a test. The city a petri dish where administration is testing the limits of its power and the strength of the resistance it encounters. In Wednesday's newsletter I included video of the interview I'd done with conservative historian, Robert Kagan, in which he set out very clearly how the intention is to provoke street violence in order for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

This is intended to provoke a reaction and it's the form that reaction takes, that's so critical.

And that's why again, I'm going to highlight Mark Carney's speech at Davos. I wrote a newsletter about it on Wednesday because here, finally there was someone with authority prepared to acknowledge what the fuck is going on and defend what we may one day describe as the reality-based order.

And I'm so glad I did, because if I'd waited until the end of the week, it would already have been eclipsed, another fleeting moment in a frantic news cycle that is never going to let up, that's also the point.

But I want, again, to highlight the text he quoted from, The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel the Czechoslovakian dissident poet turned president. A book that had helped fuel an uprising that had ultimately led to a wave of revolutions across Europe which had in turn led to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

In countries under the Iron Curtain, people felt powerless, but they weren't, that was Havel's message. And also, Carney's. The job of power is to make people believe they have no power, but it's a lie.

And it's the same in Minnesota. It's because these protestors have power that they have to be stopped, crushed, silenced. ICE is shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood and beating disabled military veterans to prove that they can.

But the more brutality they use, the more performative the violence, the more it reveals their own weakness.

There are other videos you should watch. I'm on shitty wifi and I can't upload them but I screen recorded of NYPD officers tearing off masks of ICE agents and I can tell you how weak and ashamed and pathetic they look.

The elites are cowed. That's what Robert Kagan also said when I interviewed him. Politicians, senators, CEOs, Hollywood royalty. They're weak and cowardly and silent. But the ordinary people of Minneapolis aren't. They're showing what it takes to stand up to power. And this killing only proves it.

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I don't think it's a coincidence that the day after Carney's speech even the UK felt sufficiently embarrassed into pulling out of the Gaza's Board of and the head of NATO and various European leaders pretended they'd been brave all along.

Courage is contagious. Carney's words made a difference. That's what words do. And it's why the mass cowardice of America's rich and entitled and powerful is the real problem America is facing right now. A cowardice that's being normalised by the enabling actions of other world leaders.

"The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and act together."

That's what Carney said. He's right. And we have to keep on repeating it.

Davos is a cringefest even at the best of times. But, there was a value to crushing these leaders into a ski resort and forcing them to watch Trump up close rather than as pixels on a screen. More than that, they got to see each other, in the flesh, and their mirror neurons squirmed in collective embarrassment.

And guess what? Trump backtracked. Maybe he isn't going to invade Greenland, after all. I mean maybe he is. Who knows at this point but Trump may be the world's greatest shitposters but the physical world still matters. We are human animals. And, this week, the pack figured out that one of our own is weak and ill. He may have nukes but for all we know he may also have late stage Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease. The other leaders sniffed the air and pulled back the curtain to find only whirring some cogs and wheels. The Wizard of Davos is ill and weak and unsteady on his hooves. This week could be a crisis but also a turning point.

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Davos has always been cringe but it used to be cringily hypocritical, hosting petrodollar-sponsored panels on climate change whereas it's now given up even that pretence.

There were 41 panels - I counted them. And one on democratic threats. And among the battalions of journalists who turn up to transcribe this stuff, one of the few who bothered to ask an unscripted question was Caolan Robertson, an ex-far-right influencer turned journalist now based in Ukraine.

I love a doorstep and watching Trump's Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, desperately trying to get away from him went deservedly viral on social media.

Meanwhile the owner and editor-in-chief of my old newspaper was hosting a panel co-sponsored by the Saudi state oil company in which he interviewed the ex-commander of the IDF's notorious cyber intelligence Unit 8200.

One of these is a highly respectable mainstream editor. The other runs a YouTube channel. Maybe, it's not that journalism is failing to meet this moment, it's that it's happening elsewhere.

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Havel was a poet trapped in a totalitarian state who became President. It's never hopeless. And it's pointless and absurd to be scared of Trump when he's scared of teenagers. Why do you think he got his pals to buy TikTok this week? The social media platform whose dumb dances and funny skits helped a generation get through a global pandemic? It's because he's the loneliest, most desperate man in the world.

He's waiting for Minnesotans to blink and they're not blinking.

He's the one who blinked this week. A sickened animal who surrounded by a pack thought twice about his big boy behaviour and backed down. You know the other person who ordered extrajudicial executions on his own people? President Duterte in the Philippines. He, like Trump, was elected in 2016. He waged a war not on immigrants but drugs. Last year he was arrested for crimes against humanity. It's never hopeless.

Thank you, as ever. I'm hugely grateful to everyone who supports my work, Carole x

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

Subscribe now

Mark Carney's speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it's already yesterday's news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I'd suggest it's this.

It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world.

It's a huge relief to have a world leader simply naming what's happening. That is the first step. But, it actually goes further in that it calls out the "lie" of the "rules-based order" that the "rules" were for some but not all.

That's been so abundantly proved by the global response to what's happening in Gaza but it's also not an outlier. America has been the world's policeman and sometimes that's looked less like a Victorian bobby on the beat and more like a beat-the-shit-out-of-you ICE officer and calling that out is a refreshing blast of honesty.

He begins it with the story of a shopkeeper living under Communism from a book by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident turned President. The news reports focussed on what Carney said about NATO's article five but it's what he has to say about truth that's even more urgent and important.

"Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world unite." He doesn't believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

"Havel called this living within a lie. The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

"Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

"For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

"We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

"This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

"So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

"This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition."

The end of the speech includes a call back to the Havel story:

"We are taking a sign out of the window.

"We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

"The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together."

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I lived in then-Czechoslavakia in 1990. It was less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, and inevitably I read a lot of Havel. I've been thinking about that time recently, not least because of the great historical fortune I had to be young and free in a hugely exciting moment in which the world was literally opening up before us.

So exciting that I took a year out of my degree to go and teach English to a bunch of sports journalists who worked for the newspaper affiliated with Havel's party.

It's why I found Carney's choice of story so interesting because I suspect that the book that this is taken from, The Power of the Powerless, is a text that is going to increasingly speak to us in the months and years to come.

Words matter.

That's one of the central points of Havel's essay. And also the outcome of it. After its publication in 1978, his idea that "living in truth" was both a radical and an achievable act reverberated across Eastern and Central Europe. This account, published by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, describes its direct galavanizing impact on Polish factory workers:

We can't respond and act to this hugely consequential geopolitical moment if we are complicit in the denial of our leaders and media. This is a week in which the world we have known has swung on its axis. We cannot simply carry on as if it's business as normal.

It's why Starmer's underplayed reaction is so deeply dangerous. We can all understand why, we see the reasons clearly, but not speaking the truth, now, is deeply corrosive. That is the subtext of Carney's speech. And there is a deep and dark hinterland behind it.

We've been lucky through a golden age of peace and prosperity but as he so clearly articulates, that age is gone. Ahead lies dragons.

It's why we have to listen to these voices from the past. In my newsletter on Monday, I said that the most powerful and on point thing I'd read or heard was an interview in the New Yorker by the conservative historian Robert Kagan.

Given the inadequacy of the UK response, I emailed Robert to see if he'd speak to me about what we should be doing in this moment.

This is the impromptu Zoom call I had with him which we published in The Nerve yesterday. It's a quick watch or listen - 17 minutes - (or there's a transcript here) but like Carney he names what's happening and he's very very clear on the risks: to both the US and Europe.

Thanks so much for the support & if you've seen or heard interesting articles/voices do please share in the comments. Thank you!

Full text of Mark Carney speech, World Economic Forum, January 20, 2026

Thank you very much, Larry. I'm going to start in French, and then I'll switch back to English.

(IN FRENCH)

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry — that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won't. So what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called "The Power of the Powerless," and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world unite." He doesn't believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this living within a lie. The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving — are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.

A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.

And there's another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty, sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.

The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must.

The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.

Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

So we're engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home. Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking $1 trillion of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.

We've agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we've concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We're doing something else: to help solve global problems, we're pursuing variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So on Ukraine, we're a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.

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Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so we're working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic Eight, to further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground — boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people on critical minerals.

We're forming buyer's clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naïve multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.

But I'd also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.

Which brings me back to Havel. What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?

First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described, and it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion.

That's building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government's immediate priority.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So, Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital talent. We also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but, a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

And we have something else: we have a recognition of what's happening and determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking a sign out of the window.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.

That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

Thank you very much.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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I did this in the first weeks after the inauguration last year when it felt like the mainstream media and the political establishment was wholly failing to meet the moment. It was the most graphic way I could think of to spell out what was happening.

That's overwhelmingly how I feel tonight after the news from the weekend and after getting off a Zoom with the historian Robert Kagan, more on that below.

I know it's hard in a roiling news cycle of daily new crises, but we have no hope of taking the actions necessary, if we refuse to see what's plainly before our eyes.

All through this year, moments of Trump-induced crisis have brought me a personal sense of relief: a relief that, at least, the crisis was now visible. That the stakes were now unignorable. And yesterday, that's what I thought would be the outcome of Trump's latest statement in which he said he would hold Europe financial hostage until Denmark bequeathed him Greenland. At least, I thought, we, here in Europe, would be shaken out of our stupor.

But today, it's been business as normal.

It's actually unfair to pick on the New York Times on this one though their strategy of making the chocolate chip cookie recipe as big the today-in-fascism story is not, I feel, a very helpful example of communicating news priorities.

Unfair, because the crisis today is squarely in Europe too and our newspapers are no better. We are in a profound geopolitical crisis. The world that we have known is no more. Not that you'd get this from the front page headlines.

We are now facing an aggressor in the East - Russia - and an aggressor in the West - the United States. Aggressors, who we now know beyond doubt, are not just aligned but working together.

And here we are in a crushing suicidal embrace with a country which has openly declared hostilities on us, its NATO allies.

Yet today, our prime minister announced a policy of appeasement.

And the newspapers have simply followed his lead.

Read his lips

If you heard the news on the radio or TV or saw a headline on a passing social media post, I recommend reading the actual text of Trump's Truth Social post.

Language matters. Tariffs will start at 10% and rise to 25%, he says, "until such a time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland."

I read it on Saturday night and woke Sunday morning from a dream in which I was fleeing a wildfire. Actually, it was the moment just before, when it engulfed a cliff above my house and I had to make the split-second decision on whether to run.

We have neither cliffs nor wildfires in North London. I don't even live in a house. Later, I found myself Googling "What did Hitler say about the Sudetenland?" and found this:

"My patience is now an end." The Fuhrer had made an offer to Herr Benes and it is now "peace or war in his hands".

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Some people still believe and even quote Godwin's Law - the formulation that the longer an online discussion goes on, the higher the probability of someone invoking the Nazis. They would find the analogy above facetious.

I wish. For starters, Mike Godwin, the originator of that law, suspended that law back in 2017 when neo-Nazis paraded through Charlottesville with flaming tiki torches.

And while, it wasn't across the front banner headline, even the New York Times is now saying the F word. It ran a good piece this week headlined "The Resistance Libs were Right" by Michelle Goldberg (gift link).

It begins:

"For the last decade there's been a debate, among people who don't like Donald Trump, about whether he's a fascist," she begins. "It's striking how much the arguments that Trump is not a fascist have suffered in just the first few days of this year, in which we've plunged to new depths of national madness."

It was a historian of fascism who pointed out the article to me. A historian who's faced repeated online abuse and academic backlash over the last decade for warning about Trump and what he means.

I hope people have said sorry, I texted back.

This is true. And the New York Times's headline helpfully sums up the scathing language and ironic minimization that so many academics, historians, journalists and ordinary people who could see what was happening faced. In the US, they were "resistance libs", in the UK "remoaners".

And even now, there is still an inability to process what our eyes and ears are telling us. To take just one example of this, the extreme brutality of what is happening in Minneapolis is undercut by extreme ridiculousness.

Have you seen the man dressed as a fox being tackled to the ground and cuffed by masked militiamen?

Or the disabled US military veteran being dragged out of her car and beaten?

The absurdity is as hard to process as the brutality. But that's the point. The what-the-fuck-is-this of everything happening in Minneapolis is the point of it.

This outfit went viral on social media yesterday despite any half-decent scriptwriter telling you that dressing a violent militia commander in an SS trenchcoat is just too on-the-nose.

But that's where we are. In some weird fucked-up loop in the space-time continuum between an Internet meme and the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto. Back in 2017, many people couldn't get beyond the Charlottesville tiki torches. There were entire satirical columns about the lameness of the guys who'd shopped at Target for their klan accessories. That's what stuck in the memory not the violent white supremacy that's festered underground and that had now surged to the surface.

Godwin's new law: by all means call the shitheads, Nazis.

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It's the Beltway "experts" and Westminster blowhards who've failed us. It's historians we need right now. This is the best thing I've listened to all week. It's an interview with Robert Kagan, a conservative historian and former Republican, who wrote a column about for the Washington Post in 2016 headlined "This is how fascism comes to America". It's an astonishingly prescient piece written before Trump had even won the nomination.

Kagan insists he wasn't prescient. He says he was just a historian who recognised what he was seeing. And he's the first person I've heard this week who's clearly and viscerally articulated the situation facing both America and Europe.

We are past the Trump is a "threat to democracy" stage. Kagan is clear that there will not be free and fair elections in 2026, because that is what Trump and his team is saying.

"Unless they got up on the rooftops and said they were going to subvert the 2022 election, they could not be more obvious."

And the danger of the current moment is the people who are still refusing to recognise what we are all now seeing.

"The world we've known is completely shattered. It will not be repaired until some global catastrophe that leads to some kind of reset."

That's where I am now. I'm here on Substack and with my ex-Guardian and Observer colleagues at our insurgent new news outlet, The Nerve (our indie grassroots response to the interlocking media and political crises we're facing).

Except, this isn't the fringe. 150,000 people read last week's newsletter on Palantir and the disastrous £240m deal that the UK government has just signed to embed Peter Thiel's data surveillance machinery at the heart of the our government.

To put that into context: it's substantially bigger than the circulation of the newspaper that used to employ me. And not a single national outlet has been on this story. It's perhaps not a shock, therefore, that the only vaguely mainstream figure to show an interest was the closest thing Britain has to Zohran Mamdani.

Zack Polanski is the new rising star of UK progressive politics. The 43-year-old leader of the Green party, Polanski is attracting a majority young audience with an unashamedly left-wing agenda. Last week, he invited me on his podcast, Bold Politics and among the subjects covered was Palantir and Starmer's disastrous tech deals.

There's a clip here though consider these words muted compared to what they'd have been if we'd recorded it this week:

The whole thing is here on YouTube:

On Apple, here, and here on Spotify:

It was frankly a bit weird to be interviewed by a politician rather than to do the interviewing but what Polanski is doing could be described as "podcast politics". He's on a listening brief and taking his audience on a journey. It's a clever show-not-tell strategy and it's clearly working.

Still, it could be worse. We could be Denmark. A commenter on last week's article (thank you!) also pointed out another user of Palantir's services: Denmark.

The country is in the extraordinary position of having the software owned by one of Trump's closest allies embedded into the heart of its intelligence operations. What could go wrong?

This is where we are now. And this is where the UK will be if Keir Starmer continues with the policies he's pursuing. An article in Intelligence Online this week says that Denmark is "discreetly" seeking options to replace Palantir. Let's hope so. And fast.

Especially since one military intelligence account I follow on Twitter is suggesting that the 11th Airborne Brigade, the 1,500 troops that reports say are being transferred to Minnesota, may actually be heading to Greenland. Let's hope not.

Your final reminder:

Please do leave thoughts/suggestions below. I read every one of them. And a huge thank you to everyone who's supporting my work.

Note: I removed an AI-generated video from this post after a reader correctly identified it.

A note on who I am and what I'm doing: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I coined a word to describe the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:

1. How Britain's national security is hopelessly compromised. We've sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you're American, this affects you too.)

2. The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.

3. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn't know you needed.

I've never started with a bulleted list before but then I can't remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).

This morning, the BBC ran an interview with Peter Mandelson, the self-described 'best pal' of Jeffrey Epstein and until he was sacked, the UK ambassador to Washington.

Mandelson's firm, Global Counsel, also represents Palantir, the US surveillance defence company founded by Trump ally, Peter Thiel. When Keir Starmer visited Washington, a trip arranged by Mandelson, he had only two meetings: one with Trump and one with Palantir.

If we never heard from Peter Mandelson again, it would be too soon. And yet here he is, all over the national broadcaster refusing to apologise to Epstein's victims and praising Trump's "graciousness".

But this was not all. Because also on the BBC this morning was his client, Louis Mosley, the CEO of Palantir UK and the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

I'm not linking to either of these videos because they were both absolutely abject failures of journalism. This is the second time Mosley has been invited onto this same Sunday morning show as some sort of legitimate political pundit.

He is no such thing. His company is an integral part of the US defence and homeland security apparatus and the illegal data gathering operation carried out by Elon Musk's DOGE to say nothing of its involvement in profiling kill targets for the IDF in Gaza. The only circumstance he should be on the BBC is to be subjected to a journalistic grilling, not asked a couple of softball questions on his views on global politics.

The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. Actually, it's not a contract, it's more than that. The UK government describes it as "a strategic partnership". A "partnership" entered into without any sort of competitive tender that was announced during Trump's visit to the UK and which disastrously compromises our entire national security infrastructure.

We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company whose founder is a close ally of President Trump into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.

If you're British and reading this, please send it to your MP. The level of understanding in UK politics and media about Silicon Valley's alliance with Trump and the geopolitical and security consequences of this appears to be non-existent.

If our national security rests on US technology, we have no national security.

It sounds like writerly hyperbole to describe the UK as a vassal state, but I mean it in its most literal sense. It's explicitly stated in the ur-text of Trump's White House's foreign policy, the National Security Strategy document, that US companies will be used as instruments of state power. There is no hidden agenda here: Trump has set it all out. (For a breakdown of this document and what it all means, see this week's piece in the Nerve by former British diplomat, Arthur Snell.)

What will it mean to embed American software into the UK military? Well consider, Tesla. You don't really buy a car when you buy a Tesla, you rent the software that remains the property of Elon Musk industries who can choose to immobilise your car or any feature of it at any time.

Palantir is the most terrifying of the US companies but it's also just one of a whole raft of compromising, self-sabotaging deals that the UK government has entered into. The UK 'Sovereign Cloud' has been contracted out to Oracle, owned by another key Trump ally, Larry Ellison, the man whose son is behind the disastrous buyout of CBS and the upcoming US TikTok takeover. And then there are deals with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, BlackRock, Nvidia and Scale AI.

And this was the "win", the brilliant triumph that Keir Starmer pulled from the jaws of defeat in the trade tariff negotiations. It is the opposite of that: it's surrender, the cost of which won't just be measured in pounds or dollars. I fear the cost could be much, much higher, paid in blood and pain.

It barely even registered this week that Trump announced he was increasing the US military's budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

I wrote this in last week's newsletter, on Saturday morning, hours after the US attacked Venezuela and before America woke up:

"This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It's an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn't…

Trump isn't just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in."

Trump's actions should provoke a global crisis, I said. And it should worry us more if it doesn't. A week later, the news is in: prepare to be more worried.

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I'm posting this interview between Gary Gibbons of Channel 4 News and Keir Starmer on Monday because it feels like a crucial moment that we should footnote and mark.

Starmer, an international human rights lawyer, is unable to say the attack on Venezuela was in breach of international law. This is the leader of a G7 nation, unable to confirm that black is black and white is white.

All week, pundits in the UK media have wanged on about how Starmer couldn't have his "Hugh Grant moment" - a reference to the scene in Love Actually in which he Prime Minister Grant stands up to President Billy Bob Thornton (after seeing him making moves on his lady crush) and missed the far bigger point.

It's the same pundits and journalists who applauded Starmer's actions in sucking up to Trump, laying on a state visit, a royal banquet, the full works and celebrating the "win", a deal that didn't land Britain with a disastrous trade tariff.

But what they failed to point out is that Starmer paid Trump's ransom - the disastrous, self-sabotaging tech deals detailed above. It's not that Starmer risks "offending" Trump or is "caught in a bind" or "is in a tricky position" or any of the other phrases I've read and heard all week, it's that he - and we - have been captured.

These deals represent the corporate capture of the UK state including, our cloud capacity, National Health Service, and now our military establishment. And the blindness, ignorance and ongoing denial is the most dangerous thing about this moment.

Starmer's inability to speak the truth is not diplomacy. It's evidence.

We are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump fascist project. We've sold out everyone in America who's trying to fight back against it. Worst of all, we can't even see it yet.

I'm not using the f-word lightly or facetiously. I've avoided it for a year. But what is so dangerous right now is the assault on truth, on facts, on the evidence of our own eyes. What is happening right now in America is fascism. And we, the UK, are now up to our necks in it too.

Congratulations! You've got through the depressing bit of the newsletter. This last section is a compendium of clips and images that I've seen this week that is the evidence you need that nothing is hopeless.

This is Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis. He's using the f-word too.

A masked paramilitary gunman murdered a Minneapolis citizen in cold blood, and this is what the city's mayor told ICE at his press conference. "Get the fuck out of Minneapolis."

It's a painful contrast to Keir Starmer and a necessary corrective. What Trump is doing is meant to scare us. And not being scared, speaking the facts, taking the piss and recording it all on your phone are all radical acts. All week, I've been collecting individual responses to hard power ranging from the courageous to the creative to the comedic.

I loved this footage of an Uber driver that embodies all three of these qualities. Watch him taking on US border guards who asked to see his ID. Why, he asks them? You have an accent, one of them says. "You're going by accents now?" he says incredulously. "You guys need psychiatric checkups," he tells them when they ask where he was born. He satirically taunts them until they eventually give up.

This was how London greeted the news of the Venezuela strike. A "nonce" is Britspeak for "paedophile".

I also loved and admired this woman's response to ICE agents who stopped to threaten and intimidate her for following their vehicle. I don't want you to make a bad decision, the ICE agent tells her. "That's funny coming from you!" she says smiling away at him.

And this is another brilliant official, Rochelle Bilal, the sheriff of Philadelphia, pointing out all the ways that the actions of the ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Good were in violation of both "legal law" and "moral law". ICE, she said, was "made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement".

I know, I know, this is probably too much content. But consider this a public service, I'm saving you from the algorithmic scroll which threw up this for me: Canadian comedian Trent McClellan dressed up as a NICE agent to terrorise tourists in Halifax. His weapons are Canadian-levels of courtesy and free candy. It's from two months ago but I only just clocked it and I think it's a really useful reminder that none of this is normal. This is normal:

Finally, it's been extraordinary to witness what's happening on the streets of Iran. You'll have seen the incredible rivers of protestors flooding the streets of cities all across the country. That's what people power looks like. Is it finally the revolution that Iranians have been longing for? The world is holding its breath.

I'm not sure who this woman is but this week's newsletter is dedicated to her and the people of Iran and, especially, the incredible, gutsy, powerful women who have simply had enough.

Thank you to everyone who's reading this. It's one of my own personal rays of hope. If you like it, please share it with your friends and family and tell me in the comments whether I'm right, wrong, too doomery, not doomery enough, whether you like the vids and anything else that strikes you.

Thank you so much for subscribing (and bothering to care), Carole x

A note on who I am and what I'm doing: I'm an investigative journalist who exposed the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and New York Times and I believe that we are in the grip of a new form of power: Broligarchy. The alliance of Silicon Valley, the US state and a global axis of autocracy is a threat that I'm committed to exposing.

I woke up this morning with a clear idea of something I wanted to write before 'back to school' Monday. But then I opened my phone and saw that the USA has gone full rogue state.

And since I started writing this, President Trump has claimed responsibility for a series of explosions on military bases across Venezuela. Even more extraordinarily, he announced via his social media platform, Truth Social, that he's captured President Maduro and his wife and exfiltrated them to the US.

All while America slept.

What happens next is critical. Not in the US, your news cycle today is going to be a roiling thunderdome of noise. The US army uses the language of "theaters of war" but this is military theater. A son-et-lumière spectacular crossed with an action movie. Regime change meets the Bourne Identity. I have zero doubt that there will be POV real-time helmet footage from the stormtroopers who lifted him, and that it will be crack cocaine to cable news bulletins and social media algorithms. God knows what is waiting for Maduro in the US but your news cycle is going to be flooded by this for weeks; held in a chokehold that will block all other sources of heat and light.

The east coast is waking up and Trump has scheduled a press conference for 11am ET and I wish my poor American friends the very best of luck as they try to process what is happening in the face of a wall of jingoistic propaganda and false narratives.

(And this isn't even to mention what lies in wait for the poor people of Venezuela.)

But in America, the next 24 hours and the days and weeks to follow will be a national gaslighting event. It will be claimed a criminal narco regime has been busted by the US and the people must celebrate. Notice the language in Trump's tweet. This isn't an illegal invasion or even a military action. It's "law enforcement".

Update: after writing that paragraph, AG Pam Bondi released a criminal indictment for Nicolas Maduro on "Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy" and other Byzantine charges. He will "soon face the full wrath of American justice", another not-exactly-legal term.

(If you want to understand the real background to this attack, there's a gift link here to a pretty comprehensive Dec 27 NY Times article on why Trump is attacking Venezuela and how this has been mapped out over the past year. TLDR: political expediency fomented by two of his closest consiglieri, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a Venezuela hawk, and Stephen Miller, Trump's anti-immigration overlord who's embraced the chance to go after an entire demographic.)

But it's the rest of the world that should concern us.

America cannot constrain its president right now. It's been almost impossible to pick Trump's 'worst' acts, but the strikes on "narco boats", aka murdering people without any form of due process in extrajudicial executions have to be up there.

The fact is there are no real checks on Trump's power right now. Some of the courts are still holding on some of the executive orders but he's invaded a foreign state on the bogus pretext of "law enforcement" presumably to bypass Congress's approval and if this doesn't ram home what it means to be governed by a rogue, out of control president, then what will?

And if it doesn't, if that isn't the narrative that wins through, what will that tell us about the state of the US news and information ecosystem? The next days and weeks are a test. What, if anything, will survive the blast zone of what is not just a military campaign but a targeted disinformation strike?

What the US needs to understand is that hybrid warfare isn't simply a weapon used between and against states. It's a strategy being deployed by your very own government. This is both kinetic warfare - bombs and missiles - and information warfare - false constructs, false narratives, false justifications.

A mass propaganda event is about to engulf the US and what, if anything survives it, will be a lesson for our times.

But it's what the rest of the world does now that's key.

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This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It's an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn't. The US bombed Nigeria at some point over the Christmas break and it barely broke the sound-news barrier.

How Europe and "the west" responds to Trump now and the actions that governments take downstream from that is going to set the path for 2026. Because Trump isn't just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.

Key to all of this is understanding that US companies are explicitly going to be used to enforce US national security interests. And that includes the US technology companies that are at the heart of our national infrastructure and embedded into our everyday lives.

The attack on Venezuela couldn't be a clearer example of "when someone tells you who they are, believe them". Trump has set out America's new place in the world, in the startling new US National Security Strategy document. It's only the third day of January, but Trump has made it absolutely clear that this new world order is already under way.

I was in Colombia a couple of weeks before Christmas and was with Jaime Abello Banfi, the director of the Gabo Foundation, a brilliant nonprofit set up by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, when the National Security Strategy was published.

He pointed out all the language in the document that clearly set out the US's intention to treat Latin America not even as its sphere of interest; more like its property. Its stated number one priority is "the Western hemisphere". It's a manifesto that sets out US dominance of the Americas, including its governments, through military, commercial and other means with the unquestioned support of all US private companies.

"The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity - a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region."

This isn't just about Venezuela or even its near neighbours, and not even about just Canada and Greenland, the ramifications of this document and this strategy are of consequence for us all.

When someone tells you who they are believe them. Donald Trump has told us what is coming for Europe. It's the same language of regime change that he's using for the Americas.

Here, it's not even just about America's national security or economic interests. The USA has a self-defined responsibility to prevent "civilizational erasure". The continent is under threat from migration, the EU, and "free speech censorship".

"We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation."

What we can see in Venezuela is how the US prepared over months for this moment: from deporting Venezuelan nationals to inhumane incarceration in El Salvador to the strikes on fishing vessels to blockading Venezuelan ports. And, what we need to see clearly is that a process has already begun in support of US foreign policy goals in Europe.

Those policy goals include the election of "patriotic European parties".

And as he points out in the National Security Strategy document, Trump has so many tools at his disposal.

I woke up this morning, before I'd seen any of this, thinking about just one of them. And that's where I want to end this. The UK government has been embarking on a disastrous and suicidal set of deals with US tech companies. I've written about that and will continue to write about that because it's a five-alarm fire that almost no-one in parliament seems to understand.

But what we've also learned is that Trump has a new weapon to use against anyone who stands in his way. On the night before Christmas Eve, Trump sanctioned five European citizens involved in disinformation policy and research. I wrote about that here but what I hadn't realised when that news dropped is what "sanctions" mean in an age when so much of our lives are dependent on US technology platforms.

Trump has already sanctioned six judges from the International Criminal Court and one of them, Nicholas Guillou, gave an interview to Le Monde in which he set out what that meant to his life.

This is the power that the US government can bring to bear on any individual anywhere in the world engaged in any activity it considers contrary to its national interest.

In my last newsletter, I wrote pretty personally about my efforts to overcome the attempts to silence my voice and prevent my work because I think they're directly relevant to what lies ahead. (And thank you so much to very many kind and supportive comments: thank you thank you.)

I did so because what happens to me will happen to you.

And I've been thinking about this latest, newest weapon because the targeted individuals come from a small community that tracks and investigates and attempts to regulate tech platforms; a community I'm part of.

And because my journalistic activity could be defined as contrary to the US national interest, certainly to the economic interests of its biggest companies.

And currently my income comes from this newsletter hosted on a US technology platform whose revenues come via a US payment provider. I feel the chill winds of that precarity. Just as I've felt the chill winds of reporting on Russian disinformation and sabotage. There is no difference.

On Christmas Eve, I said that America is not our enemy. It's not. We need a transatlantic alliance more than ever, but it needs to be between peoples not states. Your state is out of control. Our state is frozen in craven ignorance. And we're all, governments and people too, in a state of dangerous denial.

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PS I know there are alternatives to Substack. I went into this with eyes wide open and this certainly brings that into focus. But it's the larger point I'm trying to make here. Note too that even some of the "alternative" technology platforms such as Bluesky are American.