US Coup Gains Speed
Europe shakes as a new world order emerges. Here's what's not on the front page of the New York Times right now
A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been investigating and exposing these forces. From 2016 that included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat surface at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined in a Guardian piece last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. The US state is under attack. The post-war international order is collapsing. There are things that we can and must do.
Meanwhile, I’m one of 100+ Guardian journalists whose employment will be terminated next month. On Friday, the organisation signed a deal with OpenAI. If you find my (human!) work of value, I’d be grateful if you shared this and consider upgrading to paid. With enormous thanks to the 50,000 people who have signed up so far. I so appreciate it, Carole
What’s not on the front page of the New York Times right now
If this image looks a little bit familiar, it’s because it is. I featured a crude Photoshop of the front cover of the New York Times in last week’s newsletter, with “IT’S A COUP” written across it in big red letters.
I quoted two historians of authoritarianism and an ex-US Secretary of Labor. Professors Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Timothy Snyder and Robert Reich who were all saying it loudly and clearly and when, I thought about how to frame this week’s newsletter and illustrate it, I figured that I had to say it all over again.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about investigating and documenting the collision of technology with democracy, you just have to keep going, week after week, until finally something cracks. In this case, it turns out that’s eight years and what’s cracked is the democracy of the world’s leading superpower. But that’s where we are. It’s a coup. With the addition of this week’s terrifying new development: Russian appeasement with everything that entails.
So I’m repeating it, because the illegal seizure of power isn’t just another story to be swept away in the deluge of other stories. It’s the foundational framing to understanding everything. I’m not moving on. Think of this as the “I went to market” children’s game. Last week I went to market and bought a coup. This week, I went to market and bought a coup and a realignment of the world order.
You might argue it’s pretty punchy for an about-to-be-terminated UK journalist to be trying to land blows on the New York Times. And you’d be right. It’s why I will pull on a different source of expertise this week. We are trapped in what epidemiologist Adam Kucharski correctly identifies as “status quo or normalcy bias”. There is an inability to process, accept and confront the dangerous new reality we are in and to focus on the big picture and the pivot of history that’s occurred in the last two weeks.
The New York Times knows all of the above because there is an abundance of excellent reporting on its site that lays it out. But this is what was actually on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday night: on the left hand side is a solid summary of the ongoing illegal seizure of power and its consequences. On the right, is a feature about Ultimate Frisbee. Can you spot the problem here?
And the photo story that commands the front and centre of the most important news site in the US in the middle of this unprecedented and illegal seizure of power? It’s that evergreen standby of bargain basement two-sides journalism: the vox pop. Or as a friend in New York termed it, in a late night wtf exchange:
The whiplash from yesterday’s front page is even worse. “Putin Has Long Wanted More Power in Europe. Trump Could Grant It” sits side by side with “Egg Muffins are the Perfect On-the-Go Breakfast”.
Maybe egg muffins *are* the perfect on-the-go breakfast but we are in a moment of unprecedented danger and our media organisations are unable to understand that normal service has been suspended. Even if the New York Times wants to continue using its favoured phrase “executive power grab” as opposed to “coup”, why not try out a bigger typeface than the one you’re using for recipes? News organisations actually do need to pick a side: do they think liberal democracy is better than autocracy? If so, maybe the muffins could temporarily be re-positioned below the fold?
I’m a journalist not an editor - I love editors and if you subscribe maybe I can fund one not to mention someone with better Photoshop skills - but I’m bringing a decade-plus experience of investigating Silicon Valley, transnational corruption, Russian information warfare and oligarchic capture. I’m explicitly telling you my bona fides because as a female journalist who’s been subject to right-wing takedowns and online and organised abuse campaigns, you may be primed to think that I should get back in my box. Too bad. This is my beat in a way that it’s not for many of the Washington DC and Westminster political reporters, editors and pundits. I’ve not just studied how Russian information warfare has exploited tech platforms, my mind and body has been a blast zone for it. And I’ve not just tried - and failed - to hold Silicon Valley tech companies to account, I’ve been subject to their lies and threats. It’s a coup. And the international order is collapsing.
We aren’t helpless but we need to cycle through the denial part to get to the bit where we start fighting back and take immediate steps to protect ourselves.
D is for Denial
In Britain, the scale of denial and obliviousness is a factor worse than in the US, for obvious reasons. I wrote last week about the uncanny echoes of the abysmal early pandemic government and media failure when I found myself tweeting into the abyss as as hundreds of thousands of people attending sporting events and pop concerts.
During that pre-lockdown period, I was grateful to the few public figures who put their heads above the parapet, one of these was Adam Kucharski, quoted above, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This week he wrote this excellent Substack post here about his own pandemic echoes.
One of the biggest challenges, both during COVID and now, is status quo bias: the tendency to prefer that the existing state of affairs continue rather than change. But COVID and the US situation both represent a crucial variant of this bias, where the status quo has already collapsed, but people still act as if it remains intact. Because individuals haven’t fully processed this shift, they default to inaction, clinging to the belief that things will return to ‘normal’ instead of recognising that a fundamental change has already occurred. […]
The US was among the worst at grasping the threat of COVID when it emerged just over five years ago. Now, faced with a new threat of a runaway presidency, many journalists and public figures seem poised to make the same errors again.
It is an inevitable terrifying non-coincidence that the savage cuts to the CDC this week include to the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
The friend who pointed me to Kucharski’s post is another professor, Christina Pagel, who I got to know in 2020 when she joined the public science communication intervention I initiated precisely because the media and government response was so bad. Christina’s area of specialism is “Operational Research” and in her new Substack post she’s mapped Trump’s actions against key accepted authoritarian features.
If you want one thing to read that’s a sober and conservative but still terrifying assessment of the threat to the US The Path to American Authoritarianism:What Comes After Democratic Breakdown by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs. And if you have reading or viewing recommendations to share, do please leave them in the comments for me and others.
The Great Data Heist continues
Today’s alarming new story comes courtesy of the Washington Post headlined: Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS: The unusual request would put sensitive data about millions of American taxpayers in the hands of Trump political appointees.”
“Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to two people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency…
In his first term, Trump openly mused about sending IRS agents after political opponents, leaving agency officials on edge about the IRS’s independence.”
The way this data can be weaponised against political opponents is something that journalists Maria Ressa - the Nobel Peace Prize winner - and Rana Ayyub have both experienced in the Philippines and India. Tax investigations are a mainstay of authoritarians.
The news comes as I met my first US political refugee this weekend. If that sounds like a joke, it’s far from it. This was someone whose area of research included Kash Patel, the podcaster turned director of the FBI. Patel has explicitly said he has a list of enemies who he will go after.
Here in the UK, we are going to need to create networks of support and solidarity for individuals from our own professions who are going to come under attack. And to do that we are going to have to understand this threat at an emotional level. Both Maria and Rana star in 2073, which I’ve written about previously, Asif Kapadia’s incredibly prescient new documentary that’s starting to reach an alarmed new audience.
“This film came out slightly too early. I don’t think we fully understood what they were saying…I’m a little shocked from what I heard in this film. Something really messed up is happening.”
The Citizens, the non-profit I co-founded in 2020, campaigns and raises public awareness on big tech. If you’re a teacher, professor or student who’s interested in hosting a screening of 2073 (the film is rated 15) or in helping us develop educational resources and/or would be interested in taking this is into other schools/universities, do get in touch at info@the-citizens.com and sign up to the newsletter here to learn about future screenings. We have one this week in central London on Wednesday with Byline Times and on Sunday at east London’s Dalston Rio, with both Asif and I. Or if you’re able to help with this work in any way, we’d be hugely grateful if you’ll able to donate here. This work, like all work in the tech and information space is under threat. As US foundations come under intense political pressure, grants have already dried up. That’s only going to accelerate from here on in.
The Munich Insecurity Conference
Vice President Vance’s alarming speech against the US’s European allies in which he cheerled a Russian information warfare campaign took place at this year’s Munich Security Conference. It was days after Trump said he and Putin had agreed to end the war “immediately”. One person who was at the conference was Marietje Schaake, an ex-MEP who’s now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Centre and the author of another all-too-prescient work, The Tech Coup. This was a message she sent in a Citizens’ tech Signal group this weekend:
The conference was also the one-year anniversary of Alexei Navalny’s murder. Last year, the timing of the news on the first morning of the conference seemed unlikely to be a coincidence. It sent a chilling message to an audience expecting to hear from his wife, Yulia. This year, she spoke again.
“Even if you decided to negotiate with Putin, just remember he will lie. He will betray. He will change the rules at the last moment and force you to play his game.”
The betrayal of Ukraine and the profound and consequences for Europe will continue to play out over weeks, months, years. Today as the ripples of US regime change begin to finally ripple through, Keir Starmer announced he would be prepared “peacekeepers” to Ukraine in what he called a “one in a generation moment”.
That once-in-a-generation moment has to now start the long overdue and urgent process of understanding how our political systems, like the US’s have been infiltrated, corrupted, breached. How our electoral laws are not fit for purpose. And how Britain’s own complicity and involvement in Russia’s shadow war on the West must now be excavated and examined.
This week’s episode of mine and Peter Jukes’s Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring is not the end of the series but it is its culmination. One man has loomed large in this series time and again: Boris Johnson.
There’s a central question that both gave rise to the podcast in the first place and has propelled us through the making of it. And in episode 8, we come to the very heart of the matter: why did Boris Johnson suppress the Russia Report before the critical 2019 general election?
The annex of the report is still classified but we succeeded in finding out much more than I ever thought we could or would. We interview the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk, Christopher Steele and a key witness who informed the final report, Dominic Grieve, the Conservative MP and former attorney general who chaired parliament’s intelligence and security committee, and Ed Lucas, perhaps the UK’s leading expert on the security services. Between them, we’re able to peel back the layers of secrecy that lies at the heart of this: a scandal inside the scandal. Not just what and how Russia attacked the UK and our democratic processes. But also how, it’s been effectively and systematically covered up.
Christopher Steele told us that sources within Russian intelligence confirmed “money changed hands”. The Kremlin allocated funds to support pro-Brexit campaigns. Digest that for a moment.
He said he supplied the committee with evidence that Russian military intelligence, the GRU, the same service that the FBI proved attacked the US election was tasked with finding “legal loopholes”. That evidence has never been published. It’s still classified. And we are still ignorant and unprepared for what lies ahead. If you think that sounds shocking and alarming in the light of everything going on right now, you’d be right.
Read a short report of those new findings here and more about the Citizens’ legal case against the UK government in the European Court of Human Rights over its failure to protect our right to free and fair elections and its campaign for answers.
Finally
I’m going to put out a special post in the next couple of days on the Guardian’s new partnership with Open AI. Some background to the deal, including how the Guardian’s management used ChatGPT to break our strike, is an earlier post here. And I wrote more about Guardian’s new board member, a Google executive, brought on to “help” with AI strategy here . Do leave me any thoughts or comments you have on this below and I’ll try and include them in the post.
This is another much too-long post, probably riddled with typos. But this is a time of crisis and I refuse to accept what’s happening: with the state of journalism, with politics, with out-of-control tech bros and firms. This is a civilisational moment and battle. Please join me in trying to make sense of this moment and prepare for what’s coming next. Going forward, I want my journalism to be some sort of participatory process: free, independent and in partnership with humans not robots.
PS My friend, the editor of Byline Times, was so appalled by my Photoshop skills that he’s just re-done the NYT front cover so enjoy his superior skills. A couple of readers in the comments also correctly pointed out that I shouldn’t be linking to Amazon. I’ve now linked the 2073 film to the BFI’s website where you can rent it and other platforms all listed here.
I truly appreciate your efforts, your work on all subjects. Thank you.
Sergi and the Westminster Spy Ring is outstanding for the global perspective we all must have. Your Substack is excellent and all encompassing, I can’t recommend it enough!
It’s a coup and constitutional crisis. Please cover all the civil servants who are fighting to save our sacred democracy. My colleagues and I are gathering evidence of the muskrat and his minions’ crimes. Here is a poem I wrote to inspire all of us as we battle fascism: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/public-servant-poem-guardians-of-the-flame