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 13^th 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 64^th 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.

Additional Perugia content: interview + vibes

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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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First they came for the journalists…

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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The “buffer zone”

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…

@lebaneseamericansThe heavens as far as you can see in #Jezzine By @abir.elkhechen #Nature #Hiking #Exploring #Travel #Destination #MyLebanon #AmazingLebanon #LiveLoveLebanon #DiscoverLebanon #ExploreLebanon #ProudLebanese #LebaneseAmericans #Lebanon #Lebanese #AmericansLebanese

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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?

A mystery investor

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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What it means when someone won’t answer your press inquiries

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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The UK government changes the law

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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The ‘how’ of this

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

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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The Blair Factor

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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Blowback

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.

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One year on

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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From one year ago this week:

It’s a coup

This is what should be on every front page in 150 point banner headlines. All I have is this Substack but I lay it beneath your feet and pray to a higher power that I’m wrong.

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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It’s a coup

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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It’s a coup

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.

It’s a coup

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…

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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.

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.

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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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From today’s Press Gazette: A letter to the 300 axed Washington Post journalists

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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Palantir update

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.

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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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Ask an awkward question

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.

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A rupture, not a transition

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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“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending…”

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.

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.

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I’m back to mocking up my own front pages

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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Trump’s patience is now at an end

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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Please ignore the pundits

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.”

Out on the fringes

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:

Note: I removed an AI-generated video from this post after a reader correctly identified 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).

1) The UK’s national security is hopelessly compromised

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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2) The global war on truth..and what it means when your own PM joins it

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.

3) How to fight back

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.

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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The Rest of the World

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

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.

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.

I launched this newsletter in November 2024 in the week that Donald Trump was re-elected. Everything I’d been warning about for a decade was coming to pass, but I was energised. Reporting on information warfare had made me a target of information warfare which in turn had made me an expert in information warfare, in fighting back. And at least now, finally, the threat was visible.

A few weeks later, I distilled some of that experience into a Guardian column headlined “How to survive the Broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world”.

I’m going to re-visit that column - and where we are now - in the next newsletter because when I wrote my original column, it was a prediction of what was to come. And now it has, just faster than anybody thought.

But this week, walking the dark, secret valleys of deepest west Wales, I wanted to look back before looking forward. Reculer pour mieux sauter, they say in French. Step back to jump better.

This time, a year ago, I had no idea I’d be returning to TED, the place where in 2019 I gave another TED talk that led to a debilitating lawsuit. And I can see that from the outside, it might seem like some sort of pre-ordained success. But it wasn’t a pre-ordained anything.

And neither is what happens next.

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The precipitating incident

In the first week of February, I went out for dinner to celebrate the release of the first episode of Stalked, a BBC podcast series I’d made with Hannah, the daughter of my ex. She was the central character in the podcast and it was a big deal: a highly personal story of how she’d been groomed and then targeted by a stalker.

It had taken us nearly four years to make and was only possible because of the extraordinary diligence and care of a BBC producer called Georgia Catt. She had guided Hannah through it as she opened up her entire life to scrutiny. But now, Hannah was giddy. “I just feel so light,” she said.

We didn’t know where the story would lead. How the man we’d named would react. What would happen. He’d hired an expensive London libel lawyer and had sent repeated letters denying all claims.

But she wasn’t hiding any more. The shame and isolation had gone. She’d reclaimed her life, her story, a story that one in five women will experience in their lifetime. We toasted that and back home I doomscrolled the news and then my emails.

It was February, 2025, Elon Musk had just performed not one but two Nazi salutes at an inauguration rally and DOGE was breaking and entering into government offices to gain unlawful access to data. And TED had sent me an excitable marketing email about Sam Altman as a headline speaker in their upcoming conference.

I hit reply and tapped out an email on my phone. “You will have the bros and that's as it should be,” I wrote to Helen Walters, the senior TED curator whose name was on the email. “But you also need the voices who will tell people how to navigate this shit.”

Forty-eight hours later, she emailed back: Come.

Into the lion’s den

I didn’t reply to the email for days.

I hadn’t expected her to say yes and although I understood why I should go back - it was why I’d sent the email - I didn’t know if I could go back.

Another story: six months after my trial in the High Court in 2022, my editor invited me to a meeting at the Guardian offices.

Walking through the lobby with the posters on the walls about speaking truth to power, up the escalators, into the glass and steel heart of the building, I just had what felt like an out-of-body experience. The office was a corporate projection of money and legitimacy and authority, a symbol of the Guardian’s institutional power and importance..that just hadn’t been there for me.

Its decision to not support me in the lawsuit ultimately caused me more distress and anguish than the lawsuit itself. It wasn’t the bad guys going after me that I found so debilitating. It was the good guys not sticking up for me. I said nothing in public because I already felt so weak and exposed. To acknowledge that publicly, would only have made me more so.

I’ll spare you the details of what happened next, for now. It was, I learned afterwards, a classic PTSD episode. I’d had a similar experience right after my trial but this was six months on. It was meant to be over and it wasn’t.

I’m telling this story because this TED talk is not another data point on an upwards trajectory of what from the outside could seem like validation and success. That’s not what it was. I communicated fear in that talk because that talk came from fear.

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The day before

I wrote a draft. And then, after feedback, another one. And then a third. The day before I was due to fly out, they came back a final time, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, was summoned. It still didn’t work, he said.

Chris ripped into the talk, challenging me on multiple points, the final one of which was “Do you have to mention the lawsuit?” he said. “It means nothing to this audience.” It means something to me, I said and I burst into tears. I fought for years to defend the facts, I said. They matter to me.

“Look,” said Chris, softening. “These are suggestions. We invited you. It’s up to you what you say.”

That night, I went to the leaving party for the staff of the Observer. In the midst of the political tumult of Trump’s re-election, we’d dealt with our own internal tumult: the oligarchic capture of our newspaper. I can’t describe it in any other terms. We were being “transferred” from a non-profit to a private owner, backed by a group of investors some of whom they’d refused to disclose.

The party was a strange, bittersweet affair. Some of my colleagues were going, others - including me - weren’t. We’d needed a spokesperson and I elected to be it. It had been my choice. I didn’t regret it. But two weeks earlier, the new management had written to me: they would not be offering me a new contract.

The next day, I flew to TED.

Miss Shaky Hands

At the dress rehearsal, I physically trembled throughout. “Alright, Miss Shaky Hands,” said Helen at the end of it.

I should have spent the next morning learning it. It’s drilled into you that you need to know it word for word - you’re delivering it to 1,000 people with no notes, under the pressure that it’s going to live online forever. Instead, I spent it filling out a multi-page form in a last-minute attempt to get professional indemnity insurance.

But to do so, I needed the sign-off of a UK media lawyer. I emailed Tamsin Allen, my go-to expert. She knew the story back to front.

There’s no completely safe way you can talk about the case at TED, she told me. It’s not any one thing: it’s that it’s you and it’s TED and it’s this person. There’s a risk that couldn’t be underwritten away.

I didn’t get the insurance.

In 2019, I’d had a full-on panic attack right before I’d gone on. The stage manager had handed me a brown paper bag and I’d stood in the wings breathing in and out of it, my heart pounding in my chest. This time around, it felt more like going out to face a firing squad. I felt total resignation.

But also power. In the front row, was a full complement of Silicon Valley bros. Or as I got to call them, data rapists and collaborators.

You have more power than you think

I wasn’t sure when I began why I was writing this. But so many of the comments beneath the video on YouTube say how terrified I looked. And here in the perineum of the year, all I can say is that as fearful as I was, I am genuinely more fearful about what lies ahead. Everything I’ve feared would happen is happening.

America has fallen. NATO is teetering. Europe is on the brink of some new darkness. The Silicon Valley tech companies are now in an alliance with the worst people on the planet. But Hannah taught me a lesson. And I tried, as best as I could, to carry that forward. This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Virginia Giuffre. It’s only because of people like her that journalists can do what they do. She shone a light in the darkness.

We have more power than we think. That’s the key line from the talk. Nothing is pre-ordained. We get to decide what happens next. But I didn’t know that, until I proved it to myself. And maybe the real reason why I’ve written this today is that there is at least one person out there who needs to hear this. I hope it finds you where you are.

PS This is what a road through slice of lost rainforest in a hidden Welsh valley looks like. I’ve since discovered it’s the entrance to the Annwn in the Mabinogion, the earliest Welsh prose stories, an “Otherworld”, a place beyond mortal understanding. Which sounds about right to me.

See you in the new year x

It was going to partly be a holding note, noting how the post-war global order has profoundly shifted in the last two weeks and how I plan to cover it and try - with you - to make sense of that in the coming weeks.

But fascism never sleeps. And last night - after European offices had closed for the holidays - the US state department announced “Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex” and that it would be barring five individuals from the United States.

The so-called “global censorship-industrial complex” is a tiny world of academics and NGOs and journalists and policy wonks and lawmakers and disinformation researchers who for the last decade have been trying to understand the power and reach of the tech platforms, how they are invisibly controlling and manipulating our information spaces.

I first heard the term from a friend at a US university after she found herself described as such on a target list back in the summer of 2022. We had a good old laugh about it and have used it ironically ever since.

But the news last night was chilling.

The order states:

“The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

These “radical activists and weaponized NGOs” are my friends and colleagues and fellow fighters in the information trenches and this is a dramatic escalation. It’s Russia-level repression. It’s an all-out attack on civil society. And it’s specifically going after European efforts to legislate the social media giants for users in Europe. We are now the enemy.

Russia introduced a “foreign agent” law in 2012 to target NGOs and it was also one of the first escalations after the invasion of Ukraine when it labelled news organisations as such and made it impossible to continue reporting inside the country. This is where this leads. This is the same accusation couched in the same language.

The target here is a small group of researchers and policymakers who have understood the threat these platforms pose and have been doing the thankless and frustrating task of trying every possible route to work out how to hold them to account. And this order is perhaps the clearest signal yet of how the US government and Silicon Valley are one and the same and European liberal democracies are now the enemy.

That was what was revealed in the extraordinary National Secuity Strategy paper the US government published a week or so ago. Russia and China are no longer a threat to US national security interests. The enemy now is European democratically elected governments, especially those who seek to rein in Silicon Valley companies. And this is what this now looks like.

I was out last night, when the news broke and messages started pinging into the Signal group of the small NGO I set up in 2020, the Citizens, focussed on exactly these issues. We too are members of the “Global Censorship Industrial Complex”.

Initially, it wasn’t clear who the five individuals were and it could have been any of the many members of that group. But then, it was revealed. One of them - whom I know - is Imran Ahmed, a Brit living in the States and who, according to the order, will now be deported. He’s CEO of an organisation called Center for Countering Digital Hate and if you’ve heard of him - and this is a tell - it’s because he’s previously been targeted by Elon Musk, who’s sued him.

And another is Thierry Breton, a high-profile former member of the European Commission who was instrumental in the Digital Services Act, a piece of groundbreaking legislation that has real heft and that the Silicon Valley tech companies - and now their proxy, the US government - hate.

But perhaps, most chilling of all on a personal level, reading this news in London was how the US government chose to communicate this news. It was the under secretary of state, Sarah B Rogers, who released the names and she did so via the UK’s far-right GB News channel:

In the UK, we have legislation which means that it shouldn’t be possible to own and run a “far-right UK news channel”. But there you go. Rules and regulations only work if you enforce them and in GB News’s case, they’re not. And what this highlights and what hardly anyone in a position of any power in Britain seems to understand is how tightly bound up we are in the US’s technofascist plunge.

Because that’s what this is. I’ve mostly used the word technoauthoritarian rather than technofascism but the other thing I did last night after returning from a jolly Christmas celebration was to watch the banned 60 Minutes programme that was pulled off the air on Sunday night on the orders of Bari Weiss, the far-right founder of the Free Press who’s been parachuted in to run one of America’s most storied newsrooms.

If you’ve missed this story, the US investigative journalist programme, 60 Minutes, had completed a report on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison where the US deported hundreds of untried Venezuelans on the flimsiest of pretexts. Weiss pulled it claiming it “needed additional reporting” and would “air in a future broadcast”.

What Weiss hadn’t realised was that the film was already available via CBS’s international partners and it’s now been ripped and shared online. You can watch it here, for eg.

I wrote about the prison earlier this year because it was emblematic of something profoundly disturbing. The Instagram images of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, touring the prison didn’t just showcase its cruelty and depravity, this was was cruelty and depravity designed to be liked and algorithmically shared: a a concentration camp designed for social media.

Compared to some of the footage and reports I watched at the time, the 60 Minutes film is relatively tame and restrained. It includes interviews with a former prisoner, sent there by the US government, and human rights researchers who have documented how the treatment of the prisoners, in their analysis, amounts to torture.

All credit to the correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, who spoke up to defend her work. It had been screened five times, she said, for CBS’s lawyers and editorial policy team and cleared for broadcast.

“It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Which brings me, finally, to where I wanted to start. We have to keep reporting on what is happening in the world. We have to keep trying to track it and explain it. And we have to find new, creative ways to do independent journalism, to reach audiences, to convey the profound threats we are facing. And, always, to speak up, as Sharyn Alfonsi shows us, when necessary.

This is not politics as normal. And we can’t treat any of it as politics as normal.

I set up this newsletter after Trump’s re-election last November and as my own news organisation, the Guardian, was going through its own internal revolt. It had chosen to sell off part of it - the Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world - and get rid of 100+ journalists.

In the end it didn’t even sell it, it gave it away plus £5m in cash. But, the fact that just nine months on, with no external investment, a group of five of us - three editors, the creative director and me - have managed to set up a tiny new grassroots media outlet is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

I made my first reel to celebrate. It’s a cheerful watch, I promise, and it’s only been possible to do it because of the support I’ve had here. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. Grassroots, community-based efforts are, I believe, the best defence against what feels like an engulfing darkness. And that includes the media. Just look at CBS.

But we also have to have international networks of solidarity and last night’s news highlights that more than ever. If you are reading this is in America, we are not your enemy. We are your friends and allies now more than ever, Carole xxx

A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.

“Welcome to the Great AI Bubble, a metastasized trillion dollar tech tumour so massive it’s practically visible from space.”

And today, in a strange bit of timing, news lands that Peter Thiel - the closest thing the modern world has to a real-life Bond villain - has dumped his entire holding in Nvidia, the chip manufacturer. That’s the company which, alongside OpenAI, sits at the very centre of a trillion dollar…gamble. Or, as some people are calling it, a bubble. A bubble that could upend the entire US economy.

And Thiel’s move is the strongest signal yet that Silicon Valley not only knows that this is a bubble, it’s starting to feel spooked. Or, is this some bizarre 3-D chessgame that only Peter Thiel understands?

If you haven’t read that first article, I’d recommend starting there:

To understand the significance of today’s news and why I’ve decided to post again is because a) it’s Peter Thiel, the dark lord of Silicon Valley. And b) It’s Nvidia, the company that, as this chart shows, is at the centre of everything:

I bigged up that chart yesterday for the way it translates a whole lot of complicated financial deals into an image even us normies can understand: a circular economy supported by breathless articles about the uber-bros who believe they are capturing the future.

But here’s another image to burn into your eyeballs. This is the change in Peter Thiel’s share holdings that was revealed today. Second from the bottom you’ll see ‘NVDA’. That’s Nvidia, and the words next to it: “SOLD ALL”.

Or as Investing.com put it, he’s dumped the stock owing to “bubble fears”. It calculates the sale at roughly $100m. And Thiel didn’t stop there, he also slashed his holding in Elon Musk’s Tesla and liquidated his shares in energy company Vistra.

Thiel, a keen chess player, who prides himself on his ability to think twelve steps ahead seems to believe there’s a bloodbath coming. If it is a bloodbath - and that’s what the experts I quoted in my piece yesterday are also saying - then it is a bloodbath that Peter Thiel, an early investor in OpenAI, helped create. And which, he now, will in some way or another be looking both to profit from and control.

This October, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company. But it was also the world’s first $4 trillion company, a landmark it reached just a few months earlier in July this year. And that’s just two years after it hit what was then considered a huge milestone: $1 trillion.

This isn’t so much “growth” as cancer. There’s nothing healthy about a share price that looks like a late-stage diagnosis. Nvidia is at the centre of a game of musical chairs that is holding up most of the US stock market. And the experts that I quote in my piece say is that at some point the music has to stop.

The fact that it’s Nvidia and Thiel is what makes this such a toxic combo. Peter Thiel is the ur-broligarch. He cultivates a quasi Bond villain persona with an actual James Bond villain’s lair in New Zealand that he bought in case things get bumpy, which if the global economy was to collapse, would be one description for it. Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir, a military contractor to the US and Israeli governments among many others, is not just an intrusive and creepy data harvester, it’s a human rights black hole.

On an earnings call earlier this year, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a man who struggles to keep his more Messianic tendencies in check, boasted about killing people “when necessary”. That this company operates both inside Gaza surveilling and profiling people for execution and inside the UK NHS handling our most sensitive private data is one of the more sociopathic data points of the modern age.

Thiel’s ultimate goal is shadowy. But destroying and then re-making society from the ruins is certainly up there. He recently gave a series of lectures centred on his belief that the Antichrist is coming and there will be an apocalyptic endgame between good and evil. That’s not some sort of tortured metaphor, by the way. He means the actual Antichrist, who he thinks may or may not be Greta Thunberg.

In a recent New York Times interview with Ross Douthat, there was an amazing moment where he couldn’t definitively say that he wanted humanity to survive:

Douthat: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”

Thiel: “Uh…”

Douthat: “You’re hesitating.”

Thiel: “Yes. I don’t know. I would..

Douthat: “This is a long hesitation.”

Thiel: “There’s so many questions implicit in that.”

Douthat: “You would prefer the human race to survive?

Thiel: “Yes. But I would also like us to radically solve these problems.”

The “problems” Thiel wants to solve is human biology. He wants to solve death. Not everyone’s, obviously. Why would he want us hanging around for eternity? It’s his own potential demise that bothers him. He was an early adopter of the vampiric Silicon Valley practice of transfusing the blood of virgins young men into his veins. And as he continues in the NYT interview: he’s seeking a “radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

These are dangerous people. Breaking society in order to re-make it is a Thielian dream. And a global financial crash would certainly be one way to accelerate that concept. Could he actually be trying to start a run on the market?

It’s not a coincidence that the first person I’ve seen post on this outside a small circle of tech sceptics and tech investors and a few business reporters is the writer, Naomi Klein.

Klein wrote an entire book called “The Shock Doctrine” which detailed how all capitalism is “disaster capitalism”, an economic system that exploits global shocks and human misery to accrue ever greater wealth and power for the few. And this is what she posted this morning:

If Peter Thiel is aware of Klein’s Shock Doctrine, he probably views it as a handbook.

And what Klein is referring to here is that we know what happens when reckless out-of-control investors fuck things out: they get bailed out. They don’t get held to account. They don’t lose their shirts. It’s the little people - us - who pay the price for years. In Britain, an estimated 335,000 additional deaths can be attributed to the policy of ‘austerity’ that followed the financial crisis. (And the man who oversaw it is now gunning for the top job at HSBC bank. Because of course he is.)

And Klein is specifically referencing here, a suggestion floated last week by OpenAI that it might need some sort of “guarantee” from the US government, aka a bailout.

Yesterday, I quoted Roger McNamee in my newsletter as the first person who’d suggested to me what we were seeing was a bubble some 18 months ago. He’s a Silicon Valley VC who was one of the earliest investors in Facebook and was a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and I want to quote a bit more of what he told me here:

“The CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Friar, gave the game away a week ago when she said that she was thinking that there was a role for the government to play in backstopping the future investments of companies like OpenAI, that is a terrible idea.[…]

You know, everybody on Wall Street is excited about this bubble. 34% of the market value is in the big companies. The private ones have notional values that would make them, you know, Fortune 200 companies.

It’s the whole thing is crazy, but it can keep going on because, you know, there’s just no way to tell when a bubble is going to end. When it does, though, it’s going to end with, I think, a bang. And I believe that the government will probably try to bail these guys out, which would be a terrible idea, but politically, I think that’s where things are right now.”

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The Big Hypocrisy

One spicy fact I left out of my piece yesterday was that Michael Burry, the legendary investor at the centre of Michael Lewis’s book on the financial crisis, The Big Short, shocked the market last week. He also decided AI’s a bubble and he took action: shortselling not just Nvidia but also Palantir.

Burry was the genius savant played by Christian Bale in the movie of the same name. He spotted the signs of impending meltdown in the sub-prime housing market that everyone else had missed. And since then, he’s had dedicated fans who follow his every move.

I didn’t include this yesterday because I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds. But Burry is interesting. Because of his profile. Because his actions it did spook the market. And because it led to a furious riposte from none other than…Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, and long-time business partner of Peter Thiel.

Karp went on cable news to furiously denounce Burry who he more or less accused of unAmerican behaviour:

”When I hear short sellers attacking what I believe is clearly the most important software company in America — and therefore the world, in terms of our impact — simply to make money, and trying to call the AI revolution into question . . . [it] is super triggering to me,” he said.

So what gives, Peter Thiel? What’s the game? Is it 3-D chess? Or has he simply ripped the cord on his parachute and decide to bail? Thiel’s own CEO castigates anyone who “calls the AI revolution into question” But then he does a runner from the biggest company in the market. Do feel free to chip in below, in the comments if you have thoughts on this?

And now Michael Burry has take even more dramatic action. He has closed his entire investment fund saying, “My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.” Business Insider reports he also left a “cryptic message” on Twitter:

Yep. That’s how it goes. Cassandra Cadwalladr signing out here for the day. More soon.

Welcome to the Great AI Bubble, a metastasized trillion dollar tech tumour so massive it’s practically visible from space.

If you haven’t heard of this yet, it’s not because you're not paying attention. It’s because the media is part of the same mystical amalgam of bullshit and vibes that’s keeping the whole thing afloat, a circular economy of access journalism and tech hyperbole that masks something stinking and rotten at its core: OpenAI.

I’ll come to why I think bubble-nomics is also a way to understand one of the defining scandals of our time - Jeffrey Epstein - but this story isn’t just about the potential crashing of the global economy. (Though it is that.) It’s also a tale of abuse. At the TED conference earlier this year, I stood on stage and called Sam Altman a data rapist and I take nothing back.

Some 18 months or so ago, I went for lunch with my friend Roger McNamee, a legendary Silicon Valley VC turned radicalised burn-the-whole-thing-down tech justice warrior, and I listened to him commit casual tech idolatry. At the time, the headlines were dominated - as they largely still are - by article after article claiming that generative AI is a technology will revolutionise the very fabric of humanity. Or maybe kill us. Or, maybe both. But then, these are two sides of the very same coin.

Roger, however, wasn’t buying it. In his view, generative AI was just yet another Silicon Valley hype cycle. Another crypto. Another metaverse. Another Web3. Another bro-tastic sales pitch attracting unprecedented amounts of capital that couldn’t ever possibly earn a return; a narrative that was being inflated with a quasi religious zeal by the usual suspects in league with a gullible and complicit media.

Roger was the first person I heard say these things but far from the last. This spring I met and began talking to Gary Marcus, an AI scientist and another trenchant observer of the tech industry, whose views on generative AI generally and OpenAI specifically have gradually been gathering attention. To crassly sum up his views: the emperor has no clothes.

And, then five weeks ago, there was, what felt like a species leap. I’ve watched as these views have gone from niche lone voices on the periphery to headlines in the business press and what’s been fascinating is how they’re now gaining currency across social media, largely due to one piece of brilliant data journalism.

This graphic, published by Bloomberg, gave the story a single, impossible-to-forget image. It transformed the impenetrability of global economics into something that is immediately both visible and understandable.

Because if you want to know what a bubble looks like, it’s this:

The graphic isn’t properly credited so I can’t give the right person their due but the accompanying article “OpenAI, Nvidia Fuel $1 Trillion AI Market With Web of Circular Deals” is by two journalists Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh and what it does is instantly illuminate a circular economy of loans and debts and froth and hype…all entirely dependent upon one another. This emperor has $1 trillion and not a stitch to wear.

What we’re seeing is a closed doom loop underpinned by…well, what exactly? The promise of a world-changing technology that, guess what, isn’t here yet and there’s no real sign that it ever will be. These companies are stealing every scrap of data they can find, throwing compute power at it, draining our aquifers of water and our national grids of electricity and all we have so far is some software that you can’t trust not to make things up.

What’s enormously helpful in terms of getting to grips with this story is the ever unreliable Sam Altman, his performance this week summed up here:

Altman gave a car crash of an interview that you might as well watch now because it’s going to end up in a Netflix documentary at some point in the not too distant future.

This was not a hard interview. It was a bro-to-bro podcast but Altman had a meltdown. In response to a question about how a company will be able to spend $1.4 trillion when its revenue is only a tiny fraction of that, Altman throws a hissy fit: “If you want to sell your shares,” he tells the interviewer. “I’ll find you a buyer. Enough.”

It’s generally not a good idea for CEOs to tell their customers to sell their stock though it is how fraudsters tend to talk. If you don’t want to claim the million dollars I have for you in a Nigerian prince’s bank account, that’s up to you but you’re the one who’s going to miss out.

I asked Roger McNamee to record a voice note to explain what is going on and this is how he begins:

“Hi Carole, the bubble around LLMs and AI is really something to behold. I’ve been in the investment business since 1982 and I have never seen anything remotely like it.”

He points out that more money has been invested in technology since 2022 - the aforesaid trillion dollars - than he believes has been invested in technology ever and ends:

“It’s almost inconceivable that the trillion dollars will provide a reasonable rate of return, and so it does seem that it’s only a matter of time until this whole thing blows up. Now, I think the game that these guys are playing is different than the traditional one that you see on Wall Street. I think they know they’re in a bubble, and I don’t think they care….

“The whole thing is crazy, but it can keep going on because, you know, there’s just no way to tell when a bubble is going to end. When it does, though, it’s going to end with, I think, a bang.”

Listen to the voice note here or there’s a full transcript here for those who prefer to read:

I asked Gary Marcus the same question. He’s made a series of predictions about OpenAI that have, so far, turned out to be correct and believes that the current model of throwing shedloads of data at the wall is vanishingly unlikely to ever lead to AGI.

Is generative AI a bubble, I asked him? And if so, is it going to crash?’ His voicenote is below (and a full transcript here),a brilliantly succinct one minute summation that includes this line:

“I keep thinking of Wiley Coyote at the edge of a cliff in the roadrunner cartoons, and he doesn’t fall until he looks down. The question is, when are people going to look down? The finances don’t make any sense, and I think they’re starting to look down.”

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Bubble-nomics

Maybe, it’s the old adage that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but as I was thinking about all of the above, I found myself transfixed by the 23,000 Epstein emails released this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Maybe you’ve seen extracts from the emails, but it’s quite something to open up the database, search for key words and just read the raw documents. (The database is here if you want to have your own fun. I was on a transcontinental flight at the time and maybe it was thinness of the air but at some point over the international dateline my neurons started misfiring. There’s a chill that creeps over you reading the emails, a powerful elite drawn from politics and business and academia and media colluded with a child rapist to cover up child rape.

Wasn’t this another circular economy of trades and favours and a supine and sometimes complicit press? A bubble of impunity that has now finally burst?

If I had even an ounce of artistic talent, I’d re-draw that Bloomberg graphic with Trump and Epstein in place of OpenAI and Nvidia and a load of arrows flowing out and around to Woody Allen and Peter Mandelson and Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon and Michael Wolff. (Does someone want to have a go??)

Though there are some overlaps, you’ll be unshocked to hear. Peter Thiel, was an early investor in OpenAI, and is all over the emails pal-ing up to Epstein. Though not as much as Larry Summers. The 70-year-old former US treasury secretary and the ex-president of Harvard asks Epstein for advice on how to deal with his young girlfriend and trades sexist observations.

He’s also on OpenAI’s board, because of course he is.

And the journalists, oh god, the journalists. These are some of the most shocking exchanges of all. The writer and journalist Michael Wolff who repeatedly helped Epstein strategise on how to counter negative press coverage. He’s been popping up saying how it was all part of the way he handles sources but honestly, it’ll be too soon if we never hear from him again. If you listen to anyone on that, let it be Julie K Brown, the dogged Miami Herald reporter who’s done so much to expose Epstein: it was her reporting he was seeing to minimise.

And then there’s this guy from the New York Times.

Finally…

I’ve had vivid flashbacks this week to the last tech bubble. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom as a cub reporter at the Daily Telegraph and have vivid memories of both its peak and crash. In the UK, the peak of the peak was the day the travel start-up, Lastminute.com went public, and the entire country was swept up in the hype, as was my own newsroom. As the paper pumped out stories about how oversubscribed the share offer was, how revolutionary the technology, how high the valuation, I watched several journalists spend their lunch hour desperately trying to buy shares.

Weeks later, the share price tanked as the entire dot com boom collapsed. The media hadn’t just fallen for the bubble. It was the bubble. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about this week, the difference between then and now, and how back at the turn of the millennium, there was no other source of news and information.

Now there’s information everywhere. And in a week in which Sam Altman shat the bed and Epstein’s secrets have started to leak out, these old airlocked systems cannot hold. You’re going to see that OpenAI diagram everywhere in the coming weeks and months. And if a slide begins, it could happen fast. And the Epstein bubble? That’s already burst. Why do you think Trump is threatening to sue the BBC? It’s a classic attention bait-and-switch. Don’t look over there…look here!

Trump is on the run. The problem is that, years on from the Arab Spring, we’re all a little wiser about the idea that information will set us free. The opposite of lack of news and information is not truth or justice or even transparency, it’s chaos.

Information flows through platforms owned and controlled and manipulated for their ends by these same men. And shocks to the system are exactly what the disaster surveillance capitalists want.

Anyway…I met someone today who has upbeat and inspiring views on how we can take back control of these platforms (Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s cyber ambassador). More on that next time. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Griff, the collie cross, ministering to his flock of humans on the Tube.

Hang tight.

Ping! An email arrives. It’s from Nadia Sass, the woman I wrote about last week who’s at the centre of a Russian spy scandal that should be rocking Britain but has so far been largely brushed under the carpet by our right-wing and/or indifferent media.

That may be about to change. This weekend saw the first major piece on the story behind the case in the Guardian (more on that below).

But to re-cap: Nadia Sass is the other half of Oleh Voloshyn, a Russian agent, sanctioned by the US, UK and EU, who the UK police charged earlier this year with bribery. He was accused of paying a UK politician undisclosed sums of money to make pro-Kremlin statements in the European parliament.

The politician - Nathan Gill - has now pleaded guilty to eight separate counts of bribery and is awaiting sentencing. And yet beyond court reports, there has been no coverage of the story despite Voloshyn’s seniority and network. US government documents state Voloshyn “acted at the direction of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)”

I’ve written two pieces here and here for the new outlet I’ve set up with my former colleages, the Nerve, that investigated some of these links including to individuals centrally involved in attempting to subvert the 2016 and 2020 US elections. Last week, I focussed in on Voloshyn’s wife, Nadia Sass, and how she appeared to have worked with him as a husband-and-wife team to target and groom high-level politicians across Europe.

As a matter of course, I emailed Sass, to offer her a right to reply. And a few days later I got a response.

“Dear Carole,” she writes.

”When a student I used to believe in high standards of British media and the UK as a bulwark of freedom of expression and press. Since then this once well deserved fame has dramatically faded away. But it totally evaporated with UK media inventing a ridiculously artificial conspiracy theory involving your humble servant.

She then goes on to discuss - at length - a photo that we’d included in the article. This one:

“I hardly know Nigel Farage having exchanged a couple of phrases with him when I asked him for a photo at the EP entrance as thousands of other ladies do. Just because he is a celebrity and a handsome and stylish English gentleman.”

In fairness, Sass may have a point about the press. Nigel Farage rarely gets called a “handsome and stylish English gentleman” here and while I’d agree about the challenge to freedom of expression in this country, a case in point: my £1m libel trial for writing about the funder of Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign and his relationship with Russian government officials. Still, though, we are some way ahead of Nadia Sass’s current home: Belarus.

She and Voloshyn fled to Minsk in early 2022 when he was charged with high treason and Sass now has a job on a Belarusian TV channel. (Belarus currently ranks 166th in the world for press freedom just ahead of close ally Russia at 171.)

But what’s most curious about this response is that I didn’t actually ask her about Nigel Farage.

My question to Sass was whether she had any response to being described as a “Kremlin agent of influence” in the European press. She didn’t respond to that allegation at all.

Instead, the second half of her email goes into another long explanation. Again, about Nigel Farage and specifically the second photo of him that she’d posted on social media.

“…Then having launched a small business trying to sell T-shirts with politically inspired cartoons I dared ask an assistant of one of British MEPs to pass Nigel a specially designed T-shirt for one simple reason: I wanted to use photo with him to promote my business in Facebook.”

(There’s no ready evidence of Sass’s t-shirt business on the internet but the t-shirt is still available via a US website that appears to have no connection to Sass.)

“That’s the whole story. What a crooked or perverted mind could have created out of it a large-scale conspiracy involving me, Kremlin and Reform UK that hardly existed even the moment that T-shirt was presented by a middleman to Nigel?! Only liberal media out of touch with reality and any professional or moral standards could have invented that.”

There’s no mention of Nathan Gill, no denial of being a “Kremlin agent of influence”, no mention of her husband’s activities. She ends by addressing my request for a telephone call:

“Given my disgust of any left-leaning media in the West that spares no efforts to stop the inevitable historic collapse of its globalist sponsors I have to reject any offer of interview. But definitely you are free to use my explanation of my extremely humble (if any at all) role in this story. Hopefully my name would not be anymore used in connection with Mr Farage whom I really don’t know personally.

Best regards, Nadia”

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The timing

Last week, I wrote about the timing of Gill’s arrest in 2021 and the long long time it took the UK police to charge him - four years. Sass’s email to me and her singular focus on Nigel Farage has made me ponder some other questions of timing.

Namely, why she posted the photos of Farage in April 2024? This was long after Nathan Gill had been arrested. Was it a warning? A threat? A shot across the bows? Or just a friendly bit of nostalgia between people who are definitely not in any way friends?

The kraken awakes

My former employer, The Guardian, finally covered the story yesterday. It’s a solid account with some interesting snippets including from Oleh Voloshyn himself who claims that Gill just failed to declare his expenses properly, something that not even Gill is claiming, having already pleaded guilty.

‘Speaking to the Guardian via email, Voloshyn denied allegations made by the US and UK that he had acted at the direction of Russia’s FSB spy agency.

He insisted the payments – typically £4,000 or £5,000 each – were merely media appearance fees, rather than bribes. He described Gill as a “humble” father of five who was “definitely not rich” and was the “victim of a geopolitical conspiracy”.’

Journalism is additive. The more journalists working on a story, the more leads chased, the more facts surfaced, the more attention paid, the more, eventually, the truth will out. It’s a relief, frankly, that the Guardian is finally on the case.

But even now, it appears to have buried the lede. Back in 2018, during the period in which we know now that Voloshyn was making payments to Nathan Gill, he and Nadia made a trip to London, and among the usual tourist sites visited was also this one:

I don’t want to teach my former bosses how to suck eggs, but guys, this feels like a story! One that walked in through your actual fecking front door.

The book Sass is holding outside the Guardian’s offices is by friend and former colleague, Luke Harding. I don’t want to steal Luke’s thunder because he’s obviously got a fascinating story to tell but this seems to be a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the gift being an actual Russian spy and his wife.

Not least because if there’s one thing that Luke knows how to do, it’s tell a story. He wrote the book that Nadia Sass is holding A Very Expensive Poison, an excellent account of brutal killing of the former FSB spy and whistleblower, Alexander Litvinenko (which incidentally was also turned into a brilliant play by Lucy Prebble).

And Voloshyn makes a pretty gripping appearance in another of Luke’s books ‘Collusion’ in his role working alongside Paul Manafort in Kyiv for the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

This was before Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager but having followed strands of this story for nearly a decade, there’s almost an inevitability to how things circle back around to Russia/Ukraine.

Luke played a big part in Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, the (number 1 hit) podcast I made earlier this year with my friend (& eagle-eyed spotter of the above pic) journalist, Peter Jukes, and producer Ruth Abrahams. That project was a crowdfunded labour of love that we undertook to try to disentangle the story of Russian interference in UK politics and bring it to a new audience with light and tone and music and drama.

And watching the way this story simply isn’t playing out in real time reinforces why we need these other ways of doing journalism because with the best will in the world, it just doesn’t work in the way we think it does any more.

Not least because so much of this story is being researched and told outside mainstream journalism: not just via the Nerve and Peter’s outlet, Byline Times, but because the Twitter account, @ReformExposed was among the first on the case in collating the clips of other Brexit MEPs making the same Kremlin propaganda points. And it was Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party, who lit up Twitter when he challenged a Reform spokesdude about the case on BBC’s Question Time.

Luke wrote this last night on social media:

“I’ve known Voloshyn from when he worked as press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow and met him and his wife Nadia Sass in 2018 when they visited London.’

Anyway, as light encouragement for someone to commission that story and for the rest of the press to belatedly join in, I’m posting, without comment, another pic from Sass’s Instagram.

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Facing War

We are at war with Russia. Or at least Russia is at war with us. We just remain in denial, a dangerous state of ignorance. That’s why this story matters. And that’s why we’re on borrowed time to wake up and realise it.

I’m writing this because British politics went full horseshoe this week: the leader of the UK’s newest leftwing party spouted lines about Ukraine and NATO that could have been written by Nigel Farage. “Both siding” Russia and Ukraine is an obscenity and NATO is our best and only chance of containing Russia. It’s an alliance that’s already hanging by a thread given Trump’s views and what is definitely not needed right now are the left-wing tankies giving him cover.

This was brought home to me by a gripping new documentary that I saw a couple of weeks ago but has stayed with me. It’s called ‘Facing War’ and it follows Jens Stoltenberg in his final year as Secretary General of NATO. If that sounds dull but worthy, I’d have said exactly the same.

I dragged out a friend to come with me and as the lights went down, I whispered, “Don’t blame me if it’s shit.” “Think Ibsen,” he said. And then it began and I was immediately hooked.

A Norwegian filmmaker, Tommy Gulliksen, had managed to persuade NATO to let him have complete access to Stoltenberg and his team and to every single head of government whom Stoltenberg met during his momentous last year in office, from 2023 to 2024.

And somehow from hundreds of hours of indescribably boring meetings, Gulliksen has crafted an incredibly gripping narrative of what is revealed to be a high-stakes thriller.

Very few documentaries are made this way through intimate observation of their subjects and up-close real-time reportage and what’s incredible in Facing War is that you get to be in the room with Stoltenberg as he deals with the nail-biting minutiae of vast, consequential geopolitical hot potatoes.

It’s his job to persuade Viktor Orbán - aka Putin’s man in Europe - and Recep Tayyib Erdogan in Turkey to admit both Sweden and Finland into the alliance. And to ensure that Ukraine gets the weapons it needs even as the US Congress refuses to release funds.

Judging from the reactions of some of the filmmakers in the audience - some of whom are Academy Awards and BAFTA voters - ‘Facing War’ has a good chance of a nomination. But, like so many great films being made now, it hasn’t yet got distribution.

It’s on at London’s Bertha DocHouse for the next three nights but if you’re interested in why, in the US in particular, so many films simply aren’t finding buyers or in a special screening of this, do keep tabs on the Nerve’s website. We’ll have some news on that soon.

Anyway, as someone with notoriously underpowered “soft power” skills, I found myself mesmerised by Jens Stoltenberg’s negotiating tactics. His mastery of the dark arts of political flirtation and seduction would surely beat that of any Russian spy’s. I still don’t quite understand how he got Viktor Orbán over the line - witchcraft? - but my big takeaway is that you don’t need a ‘yes’, you just have to do everything you can to avoid a ‘no. A lesson for life and thank you for your service, Jens.

A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.

There’s always a new low. I thought I’d already plumbed the depths of the British political and media establishment’s ignorance and wilful denial of Russia’s hybrid warfare against the West. But, there’s always a new low. And this week, Britain hit it.

There are details below about how Russia’s campaign is playing out in the US. There, President Trump has almost entirely dismantled all the traditional defences against hostile state interference and is determinedly hunting down the career intelligence officers who investigated Russia’s attacks on the 2016 and 2020 elections.

And across Europe, there is no escaping the intent. Russia flew drones into Poland and Romania and sent fighter jets into Estonian airspace. In London, three British men, recruited over Telegram, were convicted of carrying out acts of sabotage on behalf of the Wagner Group, burning a warehouse in east London. Another three men were arrested on suspicion of helping Russian intelligence this week.

And yet, there’s an uncanny silence about another extraordinary story. One that involves a high-level Kremlin spy ring targeting UK politicians.

Because if there’s one thing I thought one could reliably depend on, it’s that no British newspaper could possibly turn down a political scandal involving a young blonde woman and a series of revealing cleavage shots. Throw in a Russian spy ring and this story should be Anna Chapman #2.

Remember her? Both the US and UK press went wild for that story back in 2010. Chapman was a Russian spy who generated wall-to-wall coverage largely because of an inexhaustible supply of miniskirt and bikini shots.

This is a country in which the best-selling newspaper featured a topless ‘lovely’ on page three right up to 2015. MailOnline continues the tradition with its “sidebar of shame”. And if you’re murdered and want anyone to pay attention, my top tip is to be young, pretty and female.

And it’s not just the tabloid press. An editor who’d better remain nameless once got me to write about sexism in advertising so that - in his words - ‘we can run a big photo of those fat birds in their underwear’ (a body-positive ad for Dove, as it happens). I interviewed a load of women who told me that advertising is a toxic industry to work in and pretty much all ads are written and designed by men and the editor got his ‘fat birds’ across two broadsheet pages of a leading liberal newspaper. (The ad was, you’ve guessed it, written by an all-male creative team and this is what passed as ‘fat’ in the early 2000s.)

All of which to say is that I thought the historic resistance of the UK media establishment to cover Russian interference in UK politics would finally be busted by the story that we ran in the Nerve last week. (That’s the new publication I’ve set up with four former colleagues from the Guardian & Observer and that some of you have been kind enough to subscribe to: thank you!)

That story featured a pro-Kremlin influencer, married to a Russian agent, who claimed to be a “good friend” of Nigel Farage (a claim she now denies). And pretty sensationally, I thought, I’d also found her open Instagram account - to which we linked - and which featured any number of cleavage and bikini shots.

It was the second part of an investigation into Nathan Gill, a British politician who’s pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery. Gill, a close friend and ally of Nigel Farage, was paid to spread Kremlin propaganda points in the European Parliament.

I came up in journalism through news and I thought this was a slam dunk. We - and my friend at Byline Times, Peter Jukes (with whom I did the Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring) podcast had the story entirely to ourselves for a good two weeks but that obviously couldn’t go on.

Not now that I’d found a ton of new evidence including documents that revealed the Russian agent who recruited Gill - one Oleh Voloshyn - hadn’t worked alone but as a team with his wife, Nadia Sass. Together, they’d targeted politicians across Europe. And as well as photos of her with Nigel Farage and leading figures in Germany’s far-right AfD party, I’d also uncovered a treasure trove of photos of the kind that would make a Daily Mail picture editor weep.

How on earth could the Mailonline or Sunday Times resist that? It was inevitable they’d rip off our story and most likely claim the credit but as I said to Peter, that is actually for the good, because it would make it unignorable.

That they haven’t is an eye-opening insight into the state of the UK media system. The Chapman story had no party political overtones. She was a sexy Russian spy, end of. Whereas this story is intimately entwined with current politics and the recent past, the seeping wound that refuses to heal, Brexit.

The one outlet that followed up on the story was James O’Brien on LBC. He invited me on to explain the latest stage in a long-running legal case against the UK government that I’ve been part of since 2020 (more details below). But he also asked me why there was such a baffling silence in the rest of the media. I gave him my response but I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.

The 15-minute segment includes a really great scene setter to the legal case and then a precis of the latest story and why it matters.

(I know some of you like a transcript so I’ve created one here.)

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The Grand Chamber

This sounds like something out of Harry Potter but it’s actually Europe’s ‘Supreme Court’. It hears only cases of “exceptional importance and complexity” which test the legal principles of the European Convention on Human Rights.

That convention safeguards our rights as citizens to free and fair elections. And this week, three former MPs - Caroline Lucas, Alyn Smith and Ben Bradshaw - with the non-profit I set up, the Citizens, have lodged a claim with the Grand Chamber. It states that UK government is failing in its duty to protect elections from foreign interference and its “clear, positive duties to investigate and safeguard against foreign influence”.

Even though all three MPs have now left parliament, they have persevered with the claim and the latest filing is a big deal. As James O’Brien explains in the clip above, it all came about because of a report by the UK parliament’s security and intelligence committee which discovered the UK intelligence agencies had “turned a blind eye” to “credible evidence” of Russian interference in UK elections, including the Brexit vote.

In July, I wrote in the newsletter that we were expecting the judgment from the European court. On the day, I scanned the document to the end, read the words “not upheld” and resigned myself, again, to failure. But then I got on a call with our lawyers at Leigh Day solicitors. Tessa Gregory and Tom Short have put years into this case, mostly pro bono, and instead of downcast, they were suprisingly cock-a-hoop.

What was remarkable about the judgment, they said, is that it acknowledged pretty much every single one of our points. Yes, it said, foreign influence campaigns could seriously mislead voters. And yes, it said, there was indeed evidence of foreign interference in UK elections.

It even said the current evidence proved elections held in the UK may be neither free nor fair.

"In the present case, it would accept that there was evidence of interference in the United Kingdom’s democratic processes of sufficient intensity to be capable of impairing the very essence of the right to benefit from elections held under conditions which ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people”.

The only thing that it stopped short of was agreeing that member states have a duty to investigate such interference. That “investigatory principle” is in the statute but it’s never been tested. That’s a novel point of law. And that’s why we’re going to the Grand Chamber.

Leigh Day has something like 600 lawyers and is one of the leading human rights’ firms in the country and they’ve never taken a case to the Grand Chamber before. If we succeed, it would have ramifications for every country in Europe. And, we would finally - finally - get some answers to questions that the British state has refused to even ask.

If it’s not too late.

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Why it matters

I had lunch with the friend-of-the-newsletter Mark Bergman this week. He’s a Washington DC lawyer who’s one of a network of determined and tireless individuals in the US who are trying to track all the many ways in which Trump is tearing up the American republic and do what he can to uphold it.

Mark is a model of respectability, a former partner in a white-shoe law firm whose synopsis of where America is at right now is that “the USA is a failed democracy and a police state.”

But when I asked him to pick out what concerned him most about what is happening, he thought about it and then said: “It all comes back to Russia.” He pointed to the indictment of James Comey, the former head of the FBI, who was sacked for initiating the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.

But he also said he was profoundly disturbed by the the targeting of 37 present and former intelligence officers who’ve been stripped of their security clearances. What some people may have missed, he said, (and I include myself in that number) is what it reveals Trump’s obsession with the 2016 election and the so-called Russia Hoax”.

That language has been deliberately picked up and echoed in the UK, by the far-right leader, Nigel Farage and according to Mark Bergman, Trump’s obsession has led him on a witch-hunt that has now seen him weaponize the Department of Justice and remove “all national security defences against foreign interference.”

In short, in America, it’s increasingly looking like Putin has won.

Most of Britain is still asleep at the wheel

I just don’t have that luxury.

Farage has singled me out by name as a key perpetrator of “the Russia hoax”. He ties that explicitly to the “campaign” against Trump. He says there will be consequences.

The USA is approximately four years ahead of our timeline. But this is the trajectory we are on.

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He’s back

Like the founders of the Nerve, reporter John Sweeney used to work for the Guardian & Observer. Later he went to the BBC where he became a well-known correspondent, making films on everything from Putin to Scientology. In 2017-18, he tried to make a series of reports into Russian interference in Brexit and eventually turned whistleblower writing to the regulator, Ofcom, that he believed his journalism had been deliberately suppressed.

“In his letter, seen by Press Gazette, Sweeney said his concerns centred on seven reports across Newsnight, Panorama and BBC News that were not broadcast, a number of which he said were investigating alleged ties to Russia among figures working within British politics.

He also listed a Newsnight investigation into a firm who “sought to silence” Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia before her 2017 murder, and a BBC News investigation into Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks.

Furthermore, Sweeney told Ofcom that BBC management had “enfeebled” broadcast reports on Banks, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin.”

It felt entirely appropriate that John has joined our ranks and this week went to cover the Caerphilly by-election in Wales and another entirely under-reported aspect of that election, the Reform candidate’s relationship with….the man who took the bribes, his friend and former employer, Nathan Gill.

You can read more about that here. (And huge kudos to Caerphilly where the locals who what can be done when people come out to vote: a record turnout saw them rejecting the Reform candidate.)

What I know now (that I didn’t know then)

I was sued by the funder of Nigel Farage’s campaign over remarks about his relationship with the Russian government and stood trial in the High Court.

What I realised this week is that when I did the UK counter-terrorism police and government already knew that one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs and a close personal friend and ally had taken bribes from a Russian agent.

The police sat on that evidence for three years. There is no connection between the cases but I’ve sat with that thought all week. The police knew. The government knew. The public didn’t know. Still barely knows a thing.

The links between Trump, Brexit and Russia aren’t a hoax. And the failure of the British establishment to investigate these links and the British press to report on them is a critical infrastructure failure that feels to me like concrete cancer.

We’re riddled with it. We don’t even have a constitution to defend. We are sitting ducks.

The US had the entire FBI and DOJ on the case. The Washington Post and New York Times won Pulitzers for their reporting. And still the republic is falling and it’s falling fast.

Here not even a woman in a low cut bikini will wake the political and media establishment from their slumber. If Farage does come to power, I’m fucked. I know that. But what you need to realise is that if you are a UK citizen, you are too.

And it’s already later than we think.

We need to talk about Russia.

In a moment of escalating global emergencies, it’s hard to hold focus. The overwhelming enormity of what’s been happening in Gaza - and the US and UK complicity in it - has grasped so many of us in an enervating news chokehold.

But this week, we have to talk about Russia.

Since 2017, I have been writing about Trump, Russia and Brexit. Time and time and time again. I write about them because they are inextricably linked.

And Nigel Farage, friend and acolyte to Donald Trump, the leader of Britain’s Reform party, currently no 1 in the polls, and a master at manipulating the media has always been a key figure in that transatlantic axis. Farage has made pro-Russian statements in the EU parliament for years and for a long time was RT’s golden boy.

Eight years on, there’s been a dramatic breakthrough in Britain. It hasn’t yet hit the mainstream media, which is still ignoring the story beyond basic news reporting, but on social media, there’s now a growing understanding of the scale and import of this story. Namely, that two weeks ago, a political associate of Nigel Farage pleaded guilty to accepting “Russia-linked bribes”.

This isn’t some tinpot scandal of a bent politician and some dodgy dealing. It’s a portal into a network that’s been seeking to destabilise elections in both Ukraine and the USA. And the fact that Britain is oblivious to the import of this story and why it matters so profoundly fills me with a new wave of alarm.

That’s what I’ve written about today in the Nerve. That’s the brand-new media start-up I’ve launched with my fellow refugees from the Guardian and Observer newspapers. More on that, below.

But first, I wanted to point out, how with the same editorial and creative team behind the Nerve, we published this story in the Guardian & Observer.

It was one of the early foundational pieces I wrote about the twin insurgencies of the 2016 - the UK Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump - and the role that social media played in them.

It was edited by Sarah Donaldson who’s now leading the Nerve. And it had dramatic consequences: the next week saw the first of many legal letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue us.

Central to the piece was not just the role of the Silicon Valley tech companies, but that of a hostile foreign power: Russia. I wrote the following paragraph eight years ago, but I might as well have written it yesterday:

Last week I wrote about the deals the UK government is doing with Trump-aligned Silicon Valley tech firms. And we really are tying our future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way by Trump.

Meanwhile, the UK mainstream media and political establishment is again asleep at the wheel. The Kremlin handler at the centre of this new UK bribe scandal was part of a network of pro-Russian actors sanctioned by the US government for seeking to destabilise Ukraine. And in my article, I also focus on how the directly connect to Putin’s attack on the 2016 and 2020 US elections.

What’s key to remember in all of this is that Russia’s information warfare against the west is exactly that: it’s warfare. It’s a military strategy and it’s been overwhelming successful in the last decade.

If you’ve come this far, I want to pause briefly. Many of you will know about a long-running lawsuit that debilitated me for years. A lawsuit brought by a man whose a close associate of Farage and who funded his Brexit campaign.

That lawsuit was brought as a result of the investigative reporting I did for the Guardian and Observer newspaper but I fought the lawsuit alone. I repeated words published in the Guardian on the TED main stage. But the legal claim was directed only at me, not at the Guardian or TED. That’s what made 19 press freedom organisations so clear that this was a SLAPP - a lawsuit designed to shut me up. Which it did, for a long time.

I’ve always said how we need robust, brave mainstream news organisations to do the tough reporting required in these increasingly alarming times. But when tested, the Guardian failed and it’s a big part of not only what’s motivated me to launch the Nerve, but to be clear about the Nerve needs to be.

Drew Sullivan, the fearless editor of the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, told me that there are two golden rules his organisation follows when they get sued (which is often): always always protect the journalist first. Even if they’re a freelancer. In fact, he says especially if they’re a freelancer. You have to operate a no man left behind policy. And, the second rule, Drew says, is that you always, double down on your reporting. You cannot let the people bringing the court cases win.

We need brave, bold independent news organisations more than ever. And it’s why, in this week 2 of the Nerve, I’m back writing about Russia’s relationship with UK political figures, despite the years of pain and grief. A story that was silenced through those years. (There’s no suggestion the man who sued me is implicated in this latest scandal.)

But it has risks. And we need your support. It’s been hugely cheering. We blasted through our three month subscription targets in less than a week so thank you to everyone who signed up. But we need more support. .

My reporting - and its consequences - brings a heavy price (literally, you should see our insurance premium).

Do sign up to our free twice-weekly newsletters and if you can afford to support fearless, independent journalism (with laughs), we’d be hugely grateful.

And read here the piece I’ve written for it about how a UK politician was part of a network of pro-Russian actors seeking to destabilise Europe and the US.

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The scandal

Some quick points here.

This is the guy at the centre of it all. He’s pleaded guilty to taking bribes to make pro-Kremlin statements. [He’s called Nathan Gill and he’s the one on the right]:

Nathan Gill’s co-defendant and the one who gave him the bribes was a Ukrainian politician who the US authorities describe as an “FSB pawn”. Here’s his wife with Nigel Farage.

I wrote that tweet on the day late at night on the day that the charges against Nathan Gill were revealed. In fact I wrote a whole Twitter thread that night because it really was the work of minutes to realise who Voloshyn was and how extensive and important his network is.

Because, drum roll, I could see immediately that Voloshyn was a close associate of a Russian intelligence officer I’ve tracked for years, one Konstantin Kilminik.

Someone who has been of interest to me since I first heard of him and who, in 2020, was revealed to be….drum roll…

I deleted that tweet and the rest of the thread a few minutes after posting because three big words suddenly leapt to mind: “contempt of court”. In Britain, strict reporting restrictions apply once someone has been charged. It’s a totally different news environment from America. You can disclose only basic facts about them, nothing that could influence a potential jury. (In the whole of the last decade, no-one I’d investigated had ever been charged hence the brain fart.)

But Gill has now pleaded guilty and all this can be reported. It’s just that no-one in the so-called mainstream media has. Over at independent outlet, Byline Times, my pal Peter Jukes, did an excellent report on Gill’s role in efforts to destablise Ukraine as well as his relationship with Farage. (There’s no suggestion that Nigel Farage has taken any money from Russian-linked individuals.)

But for the Nerve, I wanted to do more on this guy. The man who bribed Gill- Oleh Voloshyn - is his very close associate, as detailed by the US government.

Kilimnik has been a source of fascination for me for years since US investigators identified him as a key Russian intelligence conduit between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

What we know is that Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, arranged for sensitive polling data to be shared with him. And for many senior people involved in investigating the Trump’s campaign links to the Russian government, this fact has always been one of the most concrete pieces of evidence of collusion in the entire Trump-Russia investigation.

And what brings things full circle, is that the data, from a Trump pollster, was processed by my old friends…Cambridge Analytica.

In fact, Konstantin Kilimnik actually owned a company with a Cambridge Analytica contractor, Sam Patten. (There’s so much more to tell you about this including the role of a Israeli cyberwarfare firm that hacked a president’s emails (Nigeria not the USA).)

Kilimnik is all over volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report, an amazing 966-page document that, even more than the Mueller Report, forensically interrogated the evidence the FBI had gathered and drew its own conclusions.

His role in attempting to subvert the US election is covered in detail in the report but also his involvement in another influence operation: a peace plan for Ukraine.

And that brings us back to Nathan Gill. It was a version of that ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine that was he was tasked - and paid - to promote.

What’s so disturbing to me right now is how blind and naive and compromised Britain is in all this. I’ve been investigating this story since November 2016 and from 2020, I’ve worked with a group of MPs on a legal challenge against the UK government to get a proper inquiry.

There’s more about my work with the non-profit, the Citizens, on that here.

And a link to our new crowdfunder here. We have news coming soon on the next stage in that legal case but we need public support. I’m sorry to include not one but two begging notes in this newsletter but I will point out that the public interest work I did over years on that campaign was unpaid and every penny of this will go towards getting the inquiry that Britain so desperately needs.

And I also want to spell out the stakes.

As the US succumbs to a populist authoritarian takeover, the UK needs to be a pillar of liberal democracy that buttresses it from the outside, a safe harbour. Instead, it’s increasingly looking like the next domino to fall. And almost no-one here seems fully alive to what that will mean.

If you’re paying any attention at all to US news, the spectacle of former FBI director James Comey in the dock this week was genuinely chilling. Comey instigated the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials. He lost his job over it. And now through a weaponized Department of Justice, Trump is seeking his revenge.

Britain simply turned the other way. The only thing we know is that the MPs who oversaw parliament’s Russia Report told us that the intelligence services had turned a blind eye even though there’s mountains of that evidence that’s been sitting in plain sight for years.

And, to return to where I began with this newsletter, it’s not just the government that has failed to do its job, the media has too. This entire investigation involved Brexit, the black hole that a right-wing owned media wouldn’t touch and the BBC baulked at.

Earlier this week, I had a vague memory of debating a former UKIP MEP, a colleague of Gill’s and Farage’s in the European parliament, on Al Jazeera. I said yes because, only non-UK outlets have always been far more diligent in following this story than UK ones.

I found the clip, from 2018, in which Mehdi Hasan, directly and boldly in a way no-one in the UK press ever has, asks the MEP about whether UKIP had accepted Russian funding. (Also enjoy my facial expressions.)

I was wrong. I said that it’s not the case that politicians were just given Kremlin bungs. We now know they were. Are? And it’s not a coincidence that Mehdi, one of Britain’s best broadcasters, has made his career outside the UK. He went from Al Jazeera to MSNBC and when he was benched by the organisation over his views on Gaza, he simply quit and set up his own, Zeteo. And to bring things around in an even fuller circle, that’s been one of our sources of inspiration for the Nerve.

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Pigeons and doves: a parable

Finally, some jolly photos and chat.

Just over a week ago, Hannah, my ex’s daughter and the star of the BBC podcast that we made together, Stalked, rang me early one morning.

We’d got home late after a transport ordeal which saw us trying to get out of London’s O2 arena after a Lady Gaga concert. We’d not been at the concert but the British Podcast Awards in the venue next door. And we were both laughing at the messages landing in a WhatsApp chat.

Stalked had been nominated for three awards. And Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, had been up for another three. That’s the independent podcast we’d produced on a crowdfunded shoestring through the Citizens about everything I’ve been writing about above, Russian interference in UK politics.

Six nominations was an unlikely haul in the circumstances. (To put it in perspective, I’ll give two completely random comparisons: the Guardian was up for two awards. And Tortoise, the podcast company that the Guardian gave the Observer to, was up for none at all.)

The BBC had bought me a ticket and Ruth Abrahams the brilliant producer of Sergei had somehow wangled some bursary tickets out of the award organisers for the povos from the non-profit and shelled out £140 each for a couple more.

But then we found we couldn’t even sit together. The Sergei crew on the poverty tickets was banished to Siberia in a deathzone in the upper tier of the venue, miles from the action. And even on the BBC’s £300-a-pop tickets, there was no dinner or, by the time we’d got there, even alcohol.

That morning, half the messages were about the industrial awards scam complex and Sergei’s genuine affront at the ‘crassness’ of the elitist seating and the ‘naff’ (his words) polyester cushions being handed out as prizes all while Hannah’s Millennial photo skills had made it look like the Oscars.

Compare & contrast:

Hannah’s Millennial Instagram account was the subject of much joshery in Stalked but last week, she claimed she’d proved her point. “Pigeons are just doves with poor marketing skills,” she told me on the phone that morning “They’re literally pigeons with a media strategy.”

Anyhow, she has a point. She reposted an Insta pic of one of our team, Phil Channell, looking like Clooney at the Academy Awards in an Insta post his daughter had proudly shared.

I’m proud too. The crowdfunded Indie podcast made on a shoestring made sure Phil was there and he’d come down from Liverpool for it. He’s the composer of the original music for both Stalked & Sergei and his music and Ruth and Georgia’s skill at arranging it was one of my favourite things about the finished podcasts. Phil was up for the full six awards and he had to be there. No man left behind.

That ought to be the golden rule of journalism. That it’s not is and that freelancers always get the bum end of the deal is one of many problems with what is an extractive industry with a terrible labour record. Freelancers if you have stories and want to work with a team that has your back, please pitch to us at the Nerve.

Anyhow, thank you so much to everyone who helped us fund the Sergei podcast and the legal challenge behind it. Both these projects were important - if completely different - stories that featured original investigative public interest reporting. We ended up with one win for Stalked for best documentary. (I shall note without commentary that we were pipped at the post in the top Spotlight category by Traitors Uncloaked.)

But best of all, they were both huge amounts of fun to make with terrific teams led by terrific producers, the brilliant Georgia Catt and Ruth Abrahams. I’m honestly not just saying that. They were both the most satisfying, creative and fun journalistic projects I’ve worked on in recent times and what I appreciated is how they reached a completely different audience from my printed work.

And because I’m not a Millennial and still haven’t grasped how to use Instagram (though I am there and will at some point get to grips with it), I’m posting some photos here:

Both podcasts are on Apple & Spotify and anywhere else you get them. (Sergei is here on Apple and Stalked is here And if you did listen to Sergei and were able to help with the next stage of the legal challenge, just a reminder that our new crowdfunder is here.

Right. That really is it now. More soon.

PS: As I explained in the group chat, this is why I’m not pasting any of the red carpet pix Hannah took of me:

And we’re launched!

Last week, I explained how out of the rubble of my previous newspaper, five of us, all long-time colleagues from the Guardian & Observer - and all women! - have joined forces to plot a new, truly independent publication. And this week, in an adrenalin-fuelled whirlwind of action, we launched it.

www.thenerve.news is now live!

Please sign up for our twice-weekly newsletter and you value a truly independent press, please consider supporting us our work.

It’s been quite the week. We launched a new (beta) website, put out our first two newsletters, hosted a panel at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, threw a launch party and just to ensure that we kept things nicely edgy, I decided to kick things off with a deep dive into Tony Blair’s financial relationships with Israeli defence and technology interests that included new allegations about some of the richest people in the world.

This was already a timely piece because of Blair’s reported involvement in ‘redevelopment’ plans for Gaza as reported earlier this year in the FT including this extraordinary graphic. (The “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone” alongside the “Gaza Trump Riviera”)

But this, our launch investigation in the Nerve had new revelations. A web of financial links between Blair and funders embedded in Israeli tech and defence, including Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world and founder of Oracle who has funded the Tony Blair Institute to the tune of some half a billion dollars.

For me, this article was an important statement of intention. The Nerve is ‘culture first’. We’re going to be reporting on the arts and entertainment and there’s going to be light and shade and fun and joy. But our core focus is culture, politics and technology. And these are all mediated by billionaire technology platforms and exposing these and their power and influence in our world has been at the centre of my work for the last decade. And whatever, the Nerve is, it’s been essential for me that it has to do that too.

We are in a democratic emergency. I had dinner last night with Nerve advisor and global superstar, Maria Ressa, the journalist and Nobel laureate who’s faced down a dictator in the Philippines. We were with her lawyer, Can Yengisu, who’s kept her out of jail and talking about the global, populist takeover, a subject that Maria is an expert in, I said in in a slightly glib, slightly catastrophist way, that I thought we had three years. “I think we have less,” she said.

Please read the piece. Larry Ellison’s breakneck takeover of US media and entertainment, including local press and - with his new partner, Rupert Murdoch - US TikTok feels like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

And what my beat has covered since 2016 is how Britain and America are cojoined. Brexit and Trump were inextricably linked, the same tech platforms, same data harvesting, same Cambridge Analytica, same far-right politicians. And that transatlantic power axis is true, even now, that we in the UK have a supposedly Labour government.

That government is entering into a series of grossly naive and self-sabotaging deals with Silicon Valley billionaires, with Larry Ellison, the prime mover at this time. And what I wanted to pull out in this piece is that this is not just a US-UK relationship and set of deals, there’s another foreign power that’s also playing a central role.

In 2016, I kept on finding the influence of a foreign state threaded through the story I was reporting: Russia. And in researching Larry Ellison and his web of influence in the US and the UK, there was another foreign power that kept on cropping up: Israel.

We were already on an incredibly tight deadline. And then the night before publication, came the announcement that Blair would be part of Donald Trump’s new ‘Peace Board'. It meant the piece couldn’t be more timely…but also that it needed re-nosing, re-editing, re-legalling…

Still, there’s nothing like making last-minute legal challenges in a breaking news situation minutes before you launch a new publication and are about to host a event in an unfamiliar city having left your laptop charger at home…

I like to think that - many months from now - the team will thank me for providing that extra editorial challenge [gritted teeth emoji/screaming emoji] but it’s fair that to say that Sarah Donaldson, who’s leading the project, was ever-so-slightly hysterical when she got to our launch event having finally pressed the button.

Tbh, it’s a massive testament to the Sarah, Jane, Lynsey and Imogen that they pulled this off. Only a tight-knit team with literally decades of production experience could have done it. A week earlier, we hadn’t even decided which platform we were going to use let alone started to build the site.

It’s four and a half months since we left the Guardian and to say that this week has felt cathartic is an understatement. I wrote here about the circumstances of our departure, a brutal bloodletting of journalistic experience and talent, in what was an opaque and unaccountable deal by the Guardian management.

But it’s also true that we wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t gone down in the way it went down. It made us understand why we need a truly independent news media. Why the existing media ecosystem of opaque billionaire-funded vehicles of political influence is not fit for this moment and why, however scrappy the Nerve is, it’s a breath of fresh air not to be inside a big multinational corporate that pretends to progressive values and it no longer practices.

(All words and opinions, my own! It’s why I’m proud to be part of a new, insurgent journalistic collective but also will be continuing to write freely, exactly as I please, here. My colleagues bear no responsibility for any of my views!)

This is just the start. We made the decision to put our own cash into this project. To put ourselves on the line and to just launch. We are starting small! That’s deliberate. We have big ambitions but as we go out and meet funders and investors, we wanted to show not tell. To be able to show Lynsey’s beautiful bold colourful designs, and how even as a media minnow, we can land great gets like Nicole Kidman, and how tracking Nigel Farage’s far-right movement is a core and ongoing concern (done with humour by the inmitableJohn Sweeney, who before he went to the BBC to kick up trouble was another Observer veteran).

And we couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of supporters, friends of the Nerve, buddies and former colleagues to show.

Carol Vorderman not only brought the glam she’s also her incredible positive energy and generous spirit towards championing the cause of independent media. There’s no-one quite like Carol in the UK media space. She has huge cut-through in the mainstream, she’s been a stalwart of TV entertainment, but she’s become a one-woman news machine in recent years. She takes the facts and explains them in forensic but entertaining detail on her Instagram and she lifts up independent investigative journalism wherever she finds it. We’re thrilled to have her as a contributing editor.

Contributing film writer Ellen E Jones - the author of Screen Wash:how film and TV can solve racism and save the world - brought a suprisingly optimistic vision of how culture really can change the world. And comedian, satirist and cult hero, Stewart Lee, gave us a huge boost of confidence just for being there.

His column was often one of the most read across the entire Guardian and Observer weekend output. He was offered a new contract at the new Observer. And when we asked him if he’d join the Nerve, a scrappy start-up with uncertain likelihood of success, he agreed pretty much instantly.

I’d arrived at the venue in a cold sweat minutes before the panel kicked off with slightly trembling hands following a last-minute sprint to the Apple Store to borrow a laptop charger to file my legal changes and a sudden panic that no-one would show up. But they did. We were in the OpenEye gallery in Liverpool, a beautiful space run as a charitable trust, loaned to us in one of many acts of generosity, and our launch event - on why culture needs more nerve - was nerve-wracking and life-affirming and above all fun.

If you’re British and of a certain age, you may remember the teenage journalism show, ‘Press Gang’. And there were times in the last week, when this whole enterprise had similar vibes.

But to be clear, that’s a good thing. It really is amazing what you can accomplish with some ‘fuck you’ energy and a deadline.

One final pic (for now), this was the ‘survivors’ shot, the Nerve-sters (+friends of the family) left standing at the end of the evening after an exhausting day following an exhausting week.

This photo reminded me of something so am re-pasting here. Sarah kept saying that the last week had reminded her of the sweat and panic and stress and insane hours of publishing Cambridge Analytica and I went and dug out this photo.

On that day. I was only held upright by the amazing team around me. That was all-women too and Sarah bossed it then as she is bossing it again now.

As Press Gazette reported on Friday, the Nerve has blasted past our target for the first month in a single week.

I’m almost beginning to think this could work.

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The Blair Rich Project

I started my piece on Blair and Israel with this vignette from back in the day. The christening of Rupert Murdoch’s youngest daughters on the banks of the River Jordan, starring Jared Kushner, the Queen of Jordan, a couple of Hollywood celebs…and lurking just out of shot, Tony Blair.

It was turned into a 19-page Hello! photoshoot and I included it because I had an eye witness who’d seen photos of Blair in white robes in the River Jordan where he “looked like the Messiah” and, a minister’s political aide had told me that it’s also Blair’s nickname around Westminster: Jesus Christ. He wields such power and influence ove Keir Starmer and his government, aides routinely find themselves asking “What will Jesus say"?”

I’m mentioning for a bunch of reasons: 1) There’s a never wrong time to post a photo of Rupert Murdoch looking like a cult member. 2) This first piece I wrote for the Nerve exemplifies why journalists needs editors. And 3) Because this same tableau is also mentioned in this week’s Observer, just with somewhat different framing.

Journalism is a discipline as much as anything else. It’s the process of going out and finding information, talking to people, sucking up facts and trying to distill what you’ve learned into some sort of sense. But, you’re only forced to figure out what it means when you have to put words in some sort of order down on the page. And that requires a deadline, an editor and a process.

Some journalists with far greater self discipline than me can do it by themselves but I can’t. I think through my fingers: it’s only when I write stuff down I figure out what I know and while I love the amazing informality and total liberation of writing whatever I like here, I also respect the process of journalism, the collective intelligence of it.

And I feel profoundly grateful there is somewhere where I’m able to investigate and write about some of the most powerful people on earth. That I get to work with a team of journalists who want to stick it to the man, to shine a light on dark corners, and will go to huge lengths to make that possible.

Carol Vorderman told the story at our launch of how she sacked twice by the BBC for speaking up. And I told the story of how I was sacked twice in the same day, also for speaking up (my contract was terminated by the Guardian on the transfer of the Observer to Tortoise Media and minutes later, by the Observer).

The head of the Scott Trust and the editor-in-chief of the Guardian told us that no jobs would be lost. That turned out not to be true. But also: for the best. Yesterday, I also felt profoundly vindicated. Not just because we’d managed to launch the Nerve. But because this was the Observer’s cover story:

The source for this piece appears to be none other than Tony Blair. It’s a glowing hagiography of Blair. It’s not that there’s no mention of his multiple conflict of interests from his business dealings and financial links to key friends and allies of Netanyahu, as exposed in theNerve this week, there’s barely half a sentence on Blair’s catastrophic adventurism in Iraq.

And here’s how that same baptism scene that I opened my piece with is painted here, embedded in a paragraph that bigs up Tony Blair’s close ties with Mr Bonesaw himself: Mohammed Bin Salman, the man who ordered the brutal slaughter of Jamal Kashoggi.

The article includes not one but four Blair allies talking about why he’s the man to “redevelop” Gaza but there was no space for a single Palestinian voice.

Instead there’s this, sourced either from someone briefed by Blair, or, more likely, from Blair himself:

He has no intention of being a “name on the door”, detached from the reality on the ground. He would base himself in the region, at least initially, and be hands-on in securing funding for the reconstruction of Gaza and ensuring that money is properly accounted for and wisely spent. Already, the Tony Blair Institute has almost 100 staff working across the Middle East. The aim is for the people doing the day-to-day governing of Gaza to be Palestinians through a technocratic, apolitical committee.

You don’t need me to tell you that there’s no such thing as a “technocratic apolitical committee”. Technology is politics. And Blair is being funded to the tune of half a billion dollars by a key ally and close friend of Netanyahu and a bunch of other people making money from Israeli defence and tech.

This isn’t “peace”, it’s total capture and erasure. And unless we have a press that critically reports on the money behind these individuals and their control of technology, politics and the media, Maria Ressa is right: the clock is ticking.

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“The Phoenix Project”

Last week, I wrote about how it’s the subscribers to this newsletter that have supported me financially while I’ve worked on this new project, but it’s way beyond that.

These were just a few of the messages pasted in the comments. Thank you for the encouragement and support. There’s so much more we need to do but we can only do this with you.

If you got to the bottom of this screed, I salute you. But I wanted to bring you up to speed with what’s happening and some flavour of what’s been going on behind the scenes.

I have a whole lot of other Russia-related updates that I’ll try and do later in the week. In the meantime, bon courage, and do let me know what you think.

With huge thanks to you all. It literally wouldn’t be possible without you.