The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

Are we headed for another Cold War?

Four years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, almost half a million people have been killed, rebuilding Ukraine could cost $588 billion, and there's still no clear endgame.

And as the battle of narratives intensifies, the drumbeat for war is getting louder across Europe. Question that narrative and you risk being labelled a Russian propagandist. But is war really inevitable? And what happens when we start treating it that way?
This week on The Tea, we’re joined by veteran journalist and author Luke Harding, author of Betrayal: Trump, Putin and The New Age of Conquest, to examine the growing confrontation between Moscow and the West.
Also in the show:

⚡ The war in Ukraine and the battle of narratives
⚡ The human cost: can Russia really be defeated militarily?
⚡ Trump & Putin: co-imperialists—or something more?
⚡ Is Trump a Russian asset?
⚡ Putin and the far right: a growing alliance?
⚡ If war can’t be won, what comes next?
As the UK edges closer to the frontline of this confrontation, we examine the risks, who benefits, and who pays the price.

#ColdWar #Ukraine #Putin #TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #LukeHarding #Russia #NATO #Geopolitics #UkraineWar #Politics #UKPolitics #Trump #Peace

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: Luke Harding
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producers: Sanjna Selve and Constance Creswell
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Research: Aliza Kayan-Ahmed and Saba Ahmadzadeh Noughani
Video Editor: Max Bubnov
An MPWR Productions show.

00:00 Introduction – Are We Heading for Another Cold War?
02:30 Luke Harding on Russia and Being Expelled From Moscow
07:35 Can a Journalist Be Neutral on Russia?
10:23 Why Does the Ukraine War Matter to Britain?
17:22 Is Russia Already at War With the UK?
20:27 Should Britain Keep Arming Ukraine?
24:32 How Drone Warfare Has Changed War Forever
28:39 Did NATO Provoke Russia’s Invasion?
32:47 Putin, Ukraine and the Case Against the NATO Argument
35:58 Can the Ukraine War Actually Be Won?
39:39 Why Putin Won’t Back Down
40:04 Why Does Trump Treat Putin Differently?
45:11 Russia’s Role in Trump’s 2016 Election
47:16 Why Is Trump So Deferential to Putin?
48:15 Does Putin Have Leverage Over Trump?
53:01 Did Russia Interfere in Brexit?
55:20 Russian Influence in British Politics
57:23 Should Russian State Media Be Banned?
01:01:51 Can There Ever Be Peace With Putin?
01:03:17 Does Arming Ukraine Prolong the War?

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

It has been a busy few weeks in the world of AI, with apocalyptic predictions back front and center after the latest “whistleblower” former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit publicly, declaring that tech companies were “racing straight to superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” His post racked up 153 million views in thirty-six hours. Right on cue, AI CEOs clamored in, apparently with a renewed enthusiasm for the very regulation they have been literally skirting for years. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for binding safety testing, while Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis now apparently wants an international body inspecting models before release.

The elephant in the room is that this is precisely what the EU AI Act which gives regulators authority to inspect, evaluate, and approve high-risk AI systems and foundation models before market release was intended to do. And you guessed it: their compliance has not exactly been consistent. While major AI developers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta) have signed voluntary agreements and participated in high-profile pilot tests, their actual submission of frontier models for pre-release inspection has been selective, inconsistent, and often fraught with tension. In other words, they are failing to submit to the very regulations they claim are desperately needed to save us all from the risk of a god-like singularity—one that promises either utopia or the end of the world apparently, and which lies on the other side of AGI, the so-called “superintelligence” they all fantasize is coming. Think, the rapture but for tech nerds.

The case for the apocalypse rests on two core ideas: first, machines pursuing goals their human creators never intended; and second, a system getting smart enough to rewrite its own code, accelerating far beyond our ability to control it. Both sound terrifying until you realise they are currently based on speculative risk, the “trust me, bro” Silicon Valley hype around what might happen, while ignoring the very real risks happening right now.

That is why, when pressed in an interview on CNN about his catastrophizing predictions, Jacob Coxon admitted: “Right now, no. The models we have today are not an existential threat to humanity.” He went on to clarify: “It’s not about today’s systems taking over the world tomorrow. Today’s risks are things like deepfakes, automated misinformation, and cyber vulnerability. The existential concern is about what happens two, three, or five generations down the line as these systems gain autonomous agency.”

He could have added “if” they develop an autonomous agency, because that, too, is entirely speculative. Where AI agents have been seen performing what is interpreted and often problematically framed in the media as ”autonomous” tasks, such as the 2023 story of an AI agent emailing Cambridge philosophy professor Dr. Henry Shevlin asking for work, it is simply executing an automated recursive loop: evaluating its own output against a prompt, deciding the next step, and executing code. It is not an indication of consciousness, though it raises questions around the risks of highly effective phishing emails and broader cybersecurity concerns where teams unleash technologies online whose inner workings they do not fully understand. Dangerous? Yes. Sentient? No.

Mainstream reporting frequently loses these critical details. Hysteria around killer robots, superintelligent beings, or immortal transhumans makes for far more compelling reading and clicks than sober risk assessments.

Underpinning so much of this spin is the Kool-Aid Silicon Valley has already drunk: that they are working on the new frontier of transhuman or post-human intelligence. Unbeknownst to many is the cult-like thinking dominating Silicon Valley, where many believe the technology will eventually deliver a god-like intelligence a tech rapture via the singularity. If you want to understand this pseudo-religious tech cult, I highly recommend astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker’s book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Becker investigates these quasi-religious ideologies namely Longtermism, Effective Altruism, Transhumanism, and AI Eschatology exposing how “billionaire prophets” cloak dangerous, self-serving fantasies of digital immortality, space colonization, and AI godhood in the language of science to justify power, distract from real-world issues, and prop up astronomical valuations.

This cult has global followers, including disgraced former Oxford fellow Nick Bostrom, who ran the now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford until emails from his graduate student years resurfaced referencing explicitly racist tropes and defenses of eugenics. Bostrom issued an apology, but it failed to placate critics largely because he conspicuously declined to retract his core premises regarding race and intelligence, choosing instead to offer a defensive academic pivot toward eugenics and population genetics. Yikes.

At the center of Bostrom’s worldview is the conviction that rapid advances in artificial intelligence will inevitably yield a “superintelligence” a belief rooted in hierarchies of human intelligence (of which tech elites, naturally, view themselves as the pinnacle) and the emergence of an intellect that vastly surpasses human thought. And wait for it: an intellect that could also be sentient, which explains the surge of legitimate-sounding articles claiming a language model can “feel pain,” love, or experience emotion. It cannot. It is code.

A committed transhumanist, Bostrom frames superintelligence not as science fiction, but as a crusade for human enhancement championing cognitive modification and even age reversal through unchecked technological application. It is precisely this high-tech messianism that allowed Bostrom’s ideas to capture Silicon Valley and earn praise from figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Peter Singer, effectively disguising deeply troubling, elitist assumptions about human value under the shiny veneer of technological progress a progress that can neither be controlled nor valued by normal financial metrics, because it is running on supremacist cult vibes disguised as smart nerd talk.

Cut to the AI bubble, which was dominating headlines before this latest round of “AI is going to kill us all” frenzy was relaunched diverting attention away from overhyped valuations and the fragile economy toward kicked-down-the-road IPOs and “arms race” rhetoric. Who can forget former Governor and current United States ambassador to Israel since 2025, Mike Huckabee discussing AI and national security during a studio interview with The Media Line in Jerusalem on September 17, 2026, in which he spells out the line propping up the current artifice: “It is an arms race, pure and simple. If America decides to slow down or hit the brakes on AI because of fear or over-regulation, China will hit the accelerator. We don’t have the luxury of opting out.”

While the race to produce powerful AI acts as cover for defense companies seeking to cash in on new technologies, the picture out of China does not support the idea that Beijing buys into the existential threat narrative so frequently propounded in Western media. When you look at China’s actual AI policy, Beijing’s stated fears center overwhelmingly on deepfakes, labor displacement, and political destabilization not a sci-fi superintelligence extinction event. If AGI were the existential threat tech leaders claim, wouldn’t every nation developing AI cite it as a primary concern?

So much of the AGI risk narrative rests on assumptions and hocus-pocus predictions. In reality, we have advanced predictive models ”stochastic parrots,” to quote the metaphor introduced by Dr. Timnit Gebru and her co-authors to describe how large language models (LLMs) stitch together words based on probability without comprehension. The term originated in a landmark 2021 research paper co-authored by Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell, which warned of LLM dangers that look nothing like today’s sci-fi hype. At the time, Dr. Gebru was the most senior Black woman on Google’s Ethical AI team when the company forced her out after rejecting the paper which has since become one of the most cited works in AI research.

Their paper warned against massive environmental costs, uncurated training data, and the amplification of societal biases and misinformation in large models, demonstrating how these tools reinforce existing racial and gender inequalities. It is striking that while the harm of AI is already non-theoretical for millions of people across the globe, the “risks” dominating public debate remain entirely speculative. Meanwhile, immediate dangers are ignored. AI was involved in military targeting in the genocide in Gaza and the bombing of the girls’ school in Iran (which our apparently super clever AI deduced was a military base!). UN reports show AI data centers consuming more electricity than entire nations like Saudi Arabia, while studies reveal our growing reliance on these tools is actively degrading human cognition. Where is the hysteria over these issues?

Worse still, where is the scrutiny of these over-inflated companies and their incestous ties. Determining whether an AI boom or bust is underway is made harder by the web of circular financing between companies that act simultaneously as investors, suppliers, and customers for one another. Microsoft is both OpenAI’s primary investor and its chief commercial partner. In its 2026 tax filings, Microsoft reported $24.1 billion in revenue tied to commercial arrangements with OpenAI—accounting that AI skeptic and bestselling author Cory Doctorow describes as “really weird math.” The five largest U.S. tech giants are on track to pour over $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone yet independent analyses indicate the industry faces a $600-billion gap between capital expenditure and software revenue. Critics like hedge fund manager Michael Burry call the doomsday narrative “self-serving hype and puffery” a convenient storyline to prop up astronomical valuations as Anthropic prepares for a $965-billion listing and OpenAI pushes its IPO down the road. Many economists predict they are due a serious devaluation which could impact the entire, already flailing economy.

On The Tea, we love to bring you grounded, solid voices in this space. We recently heard insights from Cory Doctorow—bestselling author and creator of the concept of “Enshittification,” whose latest work includes A Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI. Cory remains deeply skeptical of these exaggerated claims so I highly recommend his recent episode where he debunks much of the marketing hype. You can also check out last week’s show with former Irish diplomat and Oxford professor Dr Jennifer Cassidy, warning about much more tangible threats to our national security posed by the handing over of our data to the silicon valley bros working on experimental tech our own governments don’t have a handle on, in what she dubs ‘an open scandal’ in diplomatic circles - much tea spilt on digital sovereinty. You can also check out our episode with Oxford professor of Philosophy, Carissa Véliz who argues that AI prediction and mass surveillance undermine human agency, democracy, and privacy by turning algorithms into instruments of behavioral control and social manipulation or with child prodigy and founder of STEMETTES Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE argues that our growing over-reliance on generative AI tools is quietly altering human cognitive development, eroding foundational critical thinking skills, and outsourcing fundamental social intelligence from a very young age. Finally, if you want to hear an alternative perspective, check out one of our most watched videos with the co-founder of Stability AI Emad Mostaque on why he thinks AI could end capitalism (and possibly also the world!). All the links are on our YT - let us know where you land!

https://www.suzytamimi.com

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: Norman Finkelstein
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producer: Nadege Bizimungu & Sanjna Selva
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Video Editor: Max Bubnov
An MPWR Productions show.

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

What if tech companies had more power over your life than your own government?

Big Tech isn't just business anymore. Silicon Valley now runs its own foreign policy. Over 60 countries have opened diplomatic missions there to negotiate with tech companies as if they were nation-states. AI CEOs sit at the same tables as world leaders. And the revolving doors between government and Big Tech are spinning faster than ever.

This week on The Tea, former diplomat Dr Jennifer Cassidy, Lecturer in Diplomacy and Technology at the University of Oxford, joins us to break down how Big Tech quietly became more powerful than the states meant to govern it — and why almost no one is stopping it.

Also in the show:

⚡ Trump's AI deepfakes: a tool of mass confusion

⚡ Big Tech: a techno-fascist takeover?

⚡ Digital sovereigns: how Big Tech became more powerful than governments

⚡ State embassies in Silicon Valley: the new corporate diplomacy

⚡ Government officials to Big Tech: revolving doors and the old boys' club

⚡ Why regulation keeps falling short

As our guest argues, tech companies wield power that fundamentally compromises our national security and sovereignty. States should force these companies to be transparent. Right now, they're not.

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #AI #BigTech #TechPolitics #Trump2026 #SiliconValley #TechPower #Surveillance #Diplomacy #Democracy #Technofeudalism #news #currentaffairs

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Jennifer Cassidy

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadege Bizimungu & Iman Saleh

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Researcher: Constance Creswell

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Big Tech isn’t just business anymore. Silicon Valley now runs its own foreign policy. Over 60 countries have opened diplomatic missions there to negotiate with tech companies as if they were nation-states. AI CEOs sit at the same tables as world leaders. And the revolving doors between government and Big Tech are spinning faster than ever.

This week on The Tea, former diplomat Dr Jennifer Cassidy, Lecturer in Diplomacy and Technology at the University of Oxford, joins us to break down how Big Tech quietly became more powerful than the states meant to govern it — and why almost no one is stopping it.

Also in the show:

⚡ Trump’s AI deepfakes: a tool of mass confusion

⚡ Big Tech: a techno-fascist takeover?

⚡ Digital sovereigns: how Big Tech became more powerful than governments

⚡ State embassies in Silicon Valley: the new corporate diplomacy

⚡ Government officials to Big Tech: revolving doors and the old boys’ club

⚡ Why regulation keeps falling short

As our guest argues, tech companies wield power that fundamentally compromises our national security and sovereignty. States should force these companies to be transparent. Right now, they’re not.

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #AI #BigTech #TechPolitics #Trump2026 #SiliconValley #TechPower #Surveillance #Diplomacy #Democracy #Technofeudalism #news #currentaffairs

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Jennifer Cassidy

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadege Bizimungu & Iman Saleh

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Researcher: Constance Creswell

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

00:00:00 Introduction – Is AI Creating a New World Order?
00:02:53 How Technology Changed Diplomacy Forever
00:05:20 How Trump Has Rewritten the Rules of Diplomacy
00:10:15 What Happens When America Abandons the Global Order?
00:14:37 How America Is Exporting Its AI Empire
00:18:10 Why Europe Isn’t Standing Up to US Tech Power
00:20:43 AI, Deepfakes and the War on Reality
00:24:37 How AI Is Changing War and Diplomacy
00:27:18 Are Tech Billionaires More Powerful Than Governments?
00:30:05 The Rise of the “Digital Sovereign”
00:33:27 Why Countries Are Opening Embassies in Silicon Valley
00:39:01 What Is Silicon Valley’s Foreign Policy?
00:41:13 The Values Big Tech Is Exporting Around the World
00:44:11 The Revolving Door Between Government and Big Tech
00:50:01 Are Governments Losing Control of Their Own Data?
00:51:33 What Governments Know But Aren’t Telling the Public
00:55:40 Silicon Valley’s Plan to Build Its Own States
00:58:35 Peter Thiel, Tech Power and the Future of Democracy
01:02:21 Can Governments Still Regulate Big Tech?
01:06:23 Who Could Actually Enforce Global AI Rules?

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Let’s start with what appears to be an extraordinary announcement by the new Labour government, specifically from British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband. He recently announced an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, alongside sanctions against companies that “finance or facilitate” their construction, infrastructure, and marketing.

West Bank settlement expansion has reached record levels, marked by a surge in construction approvals, outpost establishments, and administrative restructuring tracked by monitoring organizations and international observers. Over 25,000 dunams (6,200 acres) of land were officially declared “State Land” in 2024–2025 alone, marking the largest single-year land grab by the Israeli government since the 1993 Oslo Accords. In 2025, the Israeli government formally authorized 54 new settlements, while Israeli NGO Peace Now documented the establishment of 86 unofficial outposts—an average of 1 to 2 new outposts per week.

Crucial to this expansion has been the administrative restructuring introduced under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. By transferring powers over land allocation, building permits, and infrastructure in Area C away from the military to a civilian “Settlement Administration,” the state provided the strongest evidence to date that settlements—far from being aberrations—are part and parcel of the Israeli state’s DNA and its continuous expansion since inception. Previously hidden under military jargon, this administrative transfer simply formalises what Palestinians have always known: the Israeli state works hand in hand with settlers, often publicly distancing itself while actively supporting and emboldening them on the ground. This is not new.

Between 2005 and 2023, Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din tracked over 1,600 police investigations into Israeli civilian violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. They found that only around 7% to 9% of investigations resulted in an indictment—and of the small fraction that went to court, a mere 3% resulted in a conviction. What’s more, between 50% and 60% of Palestinian victims of settler violence did not file official police complaints at all, due to a complete lack of trust in Israeli law enforcement or fear of administrative retaliation.

Settler violence and expansion are features of the Israeli state, not bugs; they are central to its project. No Israeli government in history has presided over zero settlement expansion. Not one. Since the 1967 War, every single Israeli administration—whether led by the right-wing Likud, the left-wing Labor Party, or centrist coalitions—has permitted, funded, or overseen ongoing settlement growth in the occupied territories.

Which brings us back to Britain and its new Foreign Secretary referring to “settler terrorists” perpetrating ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. Many pundits have expressed either dismay or applause for Miliband’s statements, suggesting public pressure is finally echoing in the halls of power after three years of people marching and clamoring for sanctions against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

So have the people won? Sanctions are forthcoming, but only on so-called illegal settlements— the suspension of trade witn Israel, a central call in response to the ongoing genocide, is not on the cards. Neither is a recognition that Israel’s violence is not simply a settler issue - its the IDF which has been sniping children in the head, burying them alive and raping Palestinians in Israel prisons. None of this is addressed through the impression created that the problem isn’t Israel per say, an ethno-nationalist fascist state engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide since its inception, but simply its geographic fringes. And I’m calling BS.

This attempt to reconfigure Israel itself as not the problem but the settlers themselves as the main issue, is part of the wider attempt to return the entire conversation to the October 6th status quo of discussions over a two-state solution, long used as a vacant holding pen for Palestinian hopes of self-determination. The problem is that the material reality Israel has created makes a contiguous Palestinian state a fiction. The West Bank is increasingly an archipelago of encircled Palestinian enclaves, not a single territorial expanse that Palestinians control or can traverse freely. Maps produced by UN OCHA document over 600 physical movement obstacles across the West Bank, explicitly categorizing its geography as fragmented “islands.”

Even in East Jerusalem, the city is carved into enclaves where families on the same street are separated by the wall and forced to make hour-long trips through checkpoints to visit relatives directly across the road. According to B’Tselem and UN OCHA, approximately 85% of the 708 km separation wall runs inside the West Bank rather than along the 1949 Green Line. Route design explicitly cut off Palestinian neighborhoods from the rest of the city, despite their residents holding Israeli Jerusalem ID cards.

This is where the disingenuousness becomes obvious. The Israeli government is entirely aware of this; it drives these policies to ensure, as Netanyahu has repeatedly stated, that no Palestinian state can ever exist. There is no genuine commitment from Israeli leadership to a two-state solution. Consequently, current attempts to decouple Netanyahu and his cabinet’s extremists from the broader Israeli state apparatus would be laughable if they weren’t so sinister.

Britain’s position was reportedly prompted in part by Israel’s decision to press ahead with a vast settlement expansion in the E1 corridor in the heart of the West Bank. The project is designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state,” according to far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Miliband described the issuing of construction tenders in August as a “red line.” But if the red line is anything that buries the possibility of a Palestinian state, that line was crossed long ago. Reversing the status quo—the absence of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state—would require sustained international pressure, the likes of which we have never seen applied to an Israeli government. It would require rolling back decades of settlement infrastructure, requiring a withdrawal that would dwarf the 2005 dismantling of 21 settlements inside Gaza under Ariel Sharon (a move explicitly designed by Sharon to consolidate Israel’s hold on major West Bank blocs).

In an interview with UK Fact Check Politics founder Rutam Wahab, Miliband reiterated his commitment to a Palestinian state, despite clear messaging from Israeli leadership that no such entity will be entertained. Addressing the media in late June 2026, Netanyahu explicitly declared that there is “no room for two states” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

I’m not sure how much clearer Israeli leadership needs to be. Yet Western governments continue to behave as if “extremism” can simply be excised from the government, even when the government itself is the embodiment of that ideology. Miliband’s messaging belongs to a growing genre of commentary that distances itself from Netanyahu’s cabinet while seeking to salvage the underlying state framework as a moderate middle ground. It is far from that.

During this same period, we’ve seen a wave of op-eds arguing for a return to the two-state status quo: Chris Smith and Baroness Helic writing for TIME in August 2026 (”A Two-State Solution Has Never Been More Vital”); Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House arguing in Arab News (September 2026) on the necessity of putting two states back at the center of Israeli political debate; and Stephen M. Walt writing in Foreign Policy, arguing that Israel cannot force its way into long-term security without a political settlement. (You may recall Walt as co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy alongside John Mearsheimer in 2007).

It seems the international community has decided we must return to this framework, despite every indicator showing that a contiguous Palestinian state is more unrealistic than ever. There is no willingness on the Israeli side to relinquish land, establishing legitimate Palestinian leadership remains structurally blocked (Marwan Barghouti, who could unite factions, remains in prison serving multiple life sentences), and an entire generation no longer views Israel through the lens of a standard bilateral border dispute, but as an ethno-nationalist colonial project built on ethnic cleansing and genocide. They somehow believe this genie can be put back in the bottle. It cannot.

This reality, however, is not allowed to enter mainstream policy. The priority for many Western powers remains protecting the concept of a Jewish ethno-state, even if tactical sacrifices must be made - in this case, Netenyahu, the weak link. The media circuit is suddenly full of previously silent or complicit pundits touting the need to remove Netanyahu and his “extremists”—effectively trying to rehabilitate a liberal version of the state that was simply more adept at managing our exposure to corpses on social media.

Adding to the pressure on Netanyahu, Israeli commentator and former IDF intelligence officer (Unit 8200) Shail Ben-Ephraim recently went viral for claiming that the Hannibal Directive could have been responsible for 2% to 20% of Israelis killed on October 7th. For those unfamiliar, the Hannibal Directive refers to a military protocol authorizing maximum force to prevent the capture of Israeli personnel by enemy forces, even at the risk of killing the captives themselves. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has joined the talk show circuit, directly implicating Netanyahu in the failure of October 7th by referencing advance warnings. This follows an explosive Haaretz investigation revealing that Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), President of the UAE, personally warned Netanyahu roughly 10 days before October 7th during a 45-minute call, stating that then Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was preparing a major operation. Sources indicate MBZ was surprised by Netanyahu’s dismissive response, noting that the Prime Minister did not pass the warning to key security leadership, including Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar or IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Make of that what you will—the revelations have caused a massive stir in Israel as election season kicks into high gear ahead of the legislative vote on October 27, 2026. Clinton’s sudden willingness to throw Netanyahu under the bus is a clear play to a Democratic base vocally opposed to the war. But this is not about Israeli accountability, it is precisely about Israeli impunity. Netenyahu will be blamed and the entire state apparatus and every male and female soldier who was actively involved in genocide will be given a get out of jail free card, quite literally.

Overall, it’s clear a shift is underway in how public officials across Europe, the Middle East, and the US speak about Israel. It is no coincidence this is occurring as Israel enters the final stretch of its election campaign for the 26th Knesset. While Netanyahu could theoretically retain power, polling shows Likud in decline and facing potential parliamentary gridlock. External powers who prefer a more predictable diplomatic partner are signaling a preference for a return to a less chaotic world order.

My read is that we are seeing a coordinated push to return to a legacy framework in order to shield the Israeli state’s foundational legitimacy at the precise moment it is most questioned.

While initiatives like the 2026 Paris Call for the Two-State Solution (drafted by Israeli and Palestinian civil society organizations like Uniting for a Shared Future and Principles for Peace) seek to rehabilitate this path, the primary question is not whether to revive old slogans, but what Western governments are actually prepared to do to compel Israel to cede the land necessary for a state to exist. Without concrete enforcement, this renewed enthusiasm for a two-state solution functions mainly to channel public outrage away from the root causes of Palestinian suffering. The occupation and apartheid. Neither are even mentioned by officials.

With public awareness growing worldwide, support for a single democratic state free of ethno-nationalist supremacy has never been clearer even if political will in Western capitals has yet to catch up. The question remains: can these renewed diplomatic gestures contain that shift? And after so much bloodshed, should they..?

Is the AI apocalypse real or is Silicon Valley selling us a story?

We're told AI could destroy jobs, outsmart humanity and even turn against us. At the same time, it's cracking 50-year-old scientific problems and pushing new drugs into human trials.

So are we living through a genuine technological revolution that could transform humanity or is apocalyptic rhetoric fueling one of the biggest bubbles in tech history?

This week on The Tea, we're joined by bestselling author Cory Doctorow to cut through the AI hype. In his latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory argues that AI isn't gonna replace us, but it'll trap us into serving machines instead of being served by them.

Also in the show:

⚡ Big Tech surveillance: they spy on us because we let them

⚡ AI psychosis and the mythology of Silicon Valley

⚡ OpenAI's agent "revolt" — bad code, or something bigger?

⚡ Will AI take our jobs, or just make us babysit the machines?

⚡ The hidden bubble behind the AI growth story

⚡ How do we actually change the balance of power?

As Cory argues, shopping our way out of corporate power isn't politics. Real change can only come from organising, building solidarity and becoming citizens rather than consumers.

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #CoryDoctorow #AI #BigTech #OpenAI #SiliconValley ##AIBubble #News #CurrentAffairs #USPolitics #Surveillance #FutureOfWork

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Cory Doctorow

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadege Bizimungu & Sanjna Selva

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Research: Constance Creswell & Robyn Moffat

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

00:00:00 Introduction – Is the AI Apocalypse Really Coming?

00:03:16 Cory Doctorow on Technology, Surveillance and Corporate Power

00:06:34 How Big Tech Monopolies Took Over the Internet

00:09:29 Is AI the Latest Silicon Valley Bubble?

00:11:48 What Science Fiction Teaches Us About Technology

00:18:11 Why AI Doesn't Actually Understand Anything

00:24:13 Could AI Ever Become Conscious?

00:25:09 Why AI Insiders Believe Their Own Hype

00:30:32 The Psychology Behind Silicon Valley's AI Obsession

00:34:20 Are Rogue AI Agents Actually Dangerous?

00:41:29 The Real Technological Threat Isn't AI

00:48:38 Is AI Really Coming for Your Job?

00:56:30 Can AI Really Replace Doctors?

01:05:15 Why Cory Doctorow Thinks AI Is a Bubble

01:14:21 Why Big Tech Keeps Pouring Billions Into AI

01:20:59 What Actually Happens When the AI Bubble Bursts?

01:27:01 How Ordinary People Can Fight Back

01:28:37 Why Shopping Is Not Politics

01:32:06 Building Solidarity in an Age of Crisis

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is officially Gen Z’s “breakout summer,” according to a widely shared Vox piece published this month that made the case plainly: performative pessimism is out, and joy is back. If you are chronically online, it’s hard to miss the evidence. Spider-Man: Brand New Day broke opening-weekend box office records, and five films have crossed a billion dollars globally this year, at a moment when the industry was supposed to be dying. In New York, crowds packed the streets for weeks straight, first for the Knicks’ championship run, then again when the World Cup wrapped up just across the river. On TikTok, “line culture” has become its own genre: young people queuing for hours, together, for drops and pop-ups, treating the wait as the point. This is the same generation that spent years being diagnosed with pandemic doomscrolling and “2016 nostalgia,” now being written up as proof that the malaise has finally broken.

There’s a real shift happening, and it’s good to see more young people outside, off their phones, touching grass ( literally, and I’m one of them). But the same summer this joy is being documented, 46% of Gen Z reportedly carry a diagnosed mental health condition, and nearly half of 18-29 year olds say they’d rather live in the past than the present, according to an NBC News poll released this spring. The World Health Organization has called loneliness a global health threat, linking it to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year worldwide — roughly 100 every hour, with young people and people in lower-income countries hit hardest. And in April, the singer Kehlani, who had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, told Vibe magazine that the single biggest trigger for the worst period of her life wasn’t a breakup or a professional setback. It was watching the genocide in Gaza unfold in real time. “Watching babies get blown to bits should do something to you,” she said.

After a pandemic that literally stole our early twenties, a climate crisis with no end in sight, two and a half years of a televised genocide and the rise of fascism across the world, I argue that the real crisis did not disappear simply because movie theatres are full again. It went underground, because there was never really going to be a collective way to hold grief on this scale in a hypercapitalist culture that has become very good at turning collective suffering into an individual problem you can easily solve if you can afford a BetterHelp subscription or a Wellbutrin prescription.

I’ve personally lived with diagnosed severe high-functioning depression on and off for years, much of it tangled up with the work I do as a journalist. Wellbutrin has, in one way or another, saved my life, so I’m not saying medication itself is the problem. But like most people who couldn’t look away, as Kehlani said, watching the remains of decapitated babies in plastic bags, among other things, changed something in me that I don’t think “anxiety” or “burnout” fully covers. There’s a specific kind of numbness that sets in when you’ve watched more suffering than a person is built to take in, and the culture around us has mostly learned to pathologise that response instead of asking what it might be telling us. In Britain, the number of antidepressant items prescribed each year more than tripled between 1998 and 2018, from 18.4 million to 70.9 million, and more than one in five UK adults now takes a psychiatric drug in any given year, up over 500% since 1980. And yet, as the psychiatrist and anthropologist James Davies lays out in Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis (2021), rates of mental illness haven’t fallen alongside all that medication. They’ve kept climbing, in both number and severity. Meanwhile, the global antidepressant market was worth roughly $18 billion last year and is projected to keep growing. Someone is profiting from a crisis that keeps getting bigger no matter how much we spend treating it, and it’s rarely the person sitting in the fifteen-minute appointment.

But beyond the exploitation of a mental health crisis by the pharmaceutical industry, what concerns me is that diagnosis and treatment have become the only framework we have left. When the entire vocabulary available to a generation for describing grief, rage and moral injury is clinical, everything gets sorted into “disorder” or “wellness,” with nothing left in between — no way to say that watching children die and feeling something shatter in you might not be a malfunction at all. It might be closer to a working conscience doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

As someone who has both benefited fairly from antidepressants and is also aware of how convenient it can be for a system to sedate a feeling rather than sit with what actually caused it, I went looking outside the language of Western pathology for a way to name what I was carrying, and found it, oddly enough, close to home — through people like the great American writer James Baldwin, who said once, in an interview near the end of his life, that love has never been a popular movement — that most people, if they’re honest, have never really wanted to be free, because the world is held together only by the love and the passion of a very small number of people who refuse to fall into despair. And I also learned to understand this through feminist activist bell hooks’ work, who in All About Love: New Visions takes love out of the realm of something that simply happens to us, and describes love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” She goes further: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will,” meaning that love is not just something we feel, but something we decide to do, through care, commitment, responsibility and action. Neither of them was writing about therapy. They were writing about what it costs to stay open to other people’s suffering in a world that keeps giving you reasons to close off.

There’s another scholar who has spent his career translating and defending exactly this argument, at the level of a specific, living religious tradition rather than borrowed spiritual language. Omid Safi is a professor of Islamic mysticism at Duke University, and his 2018 book, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, makes the case that ‘eshq — usually translated as radical love — isn’t sentiment. It’s treated as the actual structural force holding reality together, with grief and heartbreak built into it, not managed away from it. I’m not Muslim, and I want to be careful here, because there’s a real fault line running through how this tradition gets talked about in the West: Sufism is often presented as separable from Islam, available to anyone regardless of faith. That’s a popular reading, and it’s the exact reading Safi has spent much of his career arguing against — in essays like “Good Sufi, Bad Muslims,“ he makes the case that Sufism is tasawwuf, the inner dimension of Islam itself, rooted in the Quran, not something you can extract from it and still call it what it is.

But unlike the Western therapeutic model, which often treats emotional regulation and self optimisation as the answer to human suffering, Safi’s tradition does not ask you to regulate your way out of grief over genocide. It asks what you are going to do with a heart that has been broken open by it, and sees that breaking as meaningful, sometimes even as a call to act, rather than something you are supposed to fix and move past.

And this is why I partly think the Gen Z “breakout summer” framing quietly avoids something. The psychoanalyst Joseph Dodds has written about exactly this tension, what he calls, half-seriously, dancing at the end of the world, arguing that joy in the middle of catastrophe isn’t automatically denial, it can be one of the things that actually sustains people through it. I don’t disagree. But a generation that spent two years unable to look away from Gaza doesn’t stop carrying that just because the news cycle moved on to summer blockbusters. If anything, the reckoning usually starts after the crisis leaves the headlines and you’re left with just what it did to you. So whatever this summer’s mood is, it isn’t a generation that got over something. It’s a generation that’s exhausted, and joy and exhaustion aren’t opposites they can, and often do, sit right next to each other. What I don’t think we’ve built is anywhere for that feeling to go except into a diagnosis. Safi’s tradition, and Baldwin’s work, and Bell Hooks’, all say roughly the same thing from different centuries and different faiths: the heartbreak isn’t the malfunction. The absence of anywhere to put it is.

The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” You’ve probably seen those words plastered across a thousand sunset photos. What you certainly haven’t seen is the Islamic world that gave birth to them.

Rumi is the best-selling poet in America. Yet the Rumi embraced by the West is a very different figure from the Muslim mystic who wrote the poetry a Rumi detached from Islam and the Quran, stripped of the faith that shaped his work.

The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

This week on The Tea, we’re joined by leading Islamic scholar Omid Safi to reclaim the Rumi behind the Instagram quotes. We also explore what this erasure tells us about the West’s relationship with Islam—and the rising Islamophobia that shapes it.

Also in the show:
⚡ Rising Islamophobia: the double standards applied to Muslims and Islam
⚡ The self-help industrial complex: when ancient spirituality becomes a wellness commodity
⚡ The Filton 4: what happens when corporate property is treated as sacred, but human life is not?
⚡ Gen Z and the crisis of hope: is the future still salvageable?
⚡ Trump and Hegseth: when religion serves power
⚡ Radical love: when spirituality becomes a force for social justice
As Omid argues, the question is bigger than any one politician. If we don’t confront the systems that produce them, there will always be another Trump, another charlatan.
👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeawithMyriamFrancois #Rumi #Islam #Sufism #Spirituality #Islamophobia #Religion #Gaza #Palestine #politics #Trump2026 #currentaffairs

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: Omid Safi
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producer: Nadège Bizimungu
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Research: Constance Creswell
Video Editor: Max Bubnov
An MPWR Productions show.


Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” You’ve probably seen those words plastered across a thousand sunset photos. What you certainly haven’t seen is the Islamic world that gave birth to them.

Rumi is the best-selling poet in America. Yet the Rumi embraced by the West is a very different figure from the Muslim mystic who wrote the poetry a Rumi detached from Islam and the Quran, stripped of the faith that shaped his work.

https://www.theteanetwork.co

This week on The Tea, we’re joined by leading Islamic scholar Omid Safi to reclaim the Rumi behind the Instagram quotes. We also explore what this erasure tells us about the West’s relationship with Islam—and the rising Islamophobia that shapes it.

Also in the show:

⚡ Rising Islamophobia: the double standards applied to Muslims and Islam

⚡ The self-help industrial complex: when ancient spirituality becomes a wellness commodity

⚡ The Filton 4: what happens when corporate property is treated as sacred, but human life is not?

⚡ Gen Z and the crisis of hope: is the future still salvageable?

⚡ Trump and Hegseth: when religion serves power

⚡ Radical love: when spirituality becomes a force for social justice

As Omid argues, the question is bigger than any one politician. If we don’t confront the systems that produce them, there will always be another Trump, another charlatan.

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeawithMyriamFrancois #Rumi #Islam #Sufism #Spirituality #Islamophobia #Religion #Gaza #Palestine #politics #Trump2026 #currentaffairs

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Omid Safi

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadège Bizimungu

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Research: Constance Creswell

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seven prime ministers have promised to change Britain in the past decade. The problem is not simply that they failed to deliver, but that each one inherited a system that keeps running whoever happens to be calling the shots in Downing Street, a system that once made its money by extracting wealth from colonies around the world and now increasingly does the same thing at home.

On July 20, standing outside 10 Downing Street as Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, Andy Burnham promised to be a “circuit-breaker” for a political system he said had stopped working. “We have not been good enough, and we need to be better,” he told the country.

But “the circuit” he promised to break was already running before he took office. Five weeks before that speech, the government he had just inherited had already committed Britain to the Iran war. On March 1, Keir Starmer authorised the US to use British military bases for what he called a “specific and limited defensive purpose.” Within days, American B-2 stealth bombers were flying strike missions out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean. Iran fired ballistic missiles back at Diego Garcia. Britain’s defence secretary, John Healey, said the country had “stepped up alongside the Americans.” Iran’s foreign minister called it “participation in aggression.” Britain, for its part, has never declared itself a party to the war. But it has authorised the use of British territory and military bases to help fight it.

The British government has framed its involvement as necessary regardless, with Starmer saying Britain was acting out of what he called “our duty to the British people.” In reality, ordinary people are the ones paying for that duty, mostly in their energy bills, and corporations are benefiting. Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest and oldest marketplace for maritime insurance, made £10.6 billion in profit last year insuring the same ships crossing the same strait that helped push those bills up, its third year running at that scale. Meanwhile, an investigation published this April by Byline Times and The Ecologist traced where oil majors are booking the profits from this war, and found Britain’s own overseas territories doing the work of hiding them. Shell runs eight companies through Bermuda alone, seven through the Cayman Islands, and declares 11 percent of its global turnover in the Bahamas, a country Britain set up as a tax shelter before granting it independence and whose highest court of appeal is still British judges sitting in London. Bermuda also houses the in-house insurer for Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company. Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, tabled a parliamentary motion within days of the investigation calling on the Foreign Office to act, and dismissed the government’s proposed windfall tax as treating symptoms rather than what he called “an industrialised tax avoidance scheme.”

None of this is new, and it doesn’t begin or end with Iran or Keir Starmer. My argument is that Britain’s revolving door of prime ministers isn’t really a political failure. It’s a classic reflection of what happens once an empire runs out of colonies to take wealth from and starts taking it from home instead, serving the interests of a narrow class of shareholders and consultants while ordinary people absorb the cost.

Before Keir Starmer and Iran, Al Yamamah, Britain’s largest arms deal in history, was signed with Saudi Arabia under Margaret Thatcher in 1985 and earned BAE Systems at least £43 billion in revenue. Investigators later found up to £6 billion of that had gone out as bribes, most of it to Prince Bandar, the Saudi royal who negotiated the deal. When the Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation into it in the 2000s, the British government shut the investigation down itself, under Tony Blair, in 2006, citing national security.

Blair’s own relationship with that money didn’t end with his premiership. His consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute, took in $121 million last year, up 49 percent, largely from advising foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. He has confirmed receiving up to $12 million from a Saudi-linked organisation directly. A former prime minister is now drawing income from the same states whose oil wealth this war is currently inflating.

The legal scholar Kojo Koram has spent his career describing this same pattern. His argument is that, contrary to popular belief, Britain’s empire did not simply end with decolonisation. It was transformed into legal and financial structures that continued to do much of the same work under different names, and Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean that remains a British territory, is one of the clearest examples. It is home to one of the most important US military bases outside the United States, including the base used by B-2 bombers to strike Iran. Britain built the base by forcibly removing its entire population between 1968 and 1973, and justified the expulsion in official correspondence by describing the islanders as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.” The International Court of Justice ruled the occupation unlawful in 2019. Chagossians are still fighting in British courts to go home. The island they were removed from is now flying bombing runs into the region their descendants are watching from exile.

So every time Britain goes to war on behalf of “British people,” the people who actually win are rarely Britain as a whole. They are Shell and BP shareholders, Lloyd’s underwriters, the offshore-services firms clustered a few miles from Downing Street, and, most recently, Tony Blair personally. And critically, those winnings do not stay in Britain long enough to be taxed. They move through the same Bermuda-and-Cayman pipeline described here, the same architecture Britain built to extract wealth from its colonies without that wealth ever having to pass through a colonial treasury. The government still has to pay for the war somehow, whether through subsidising energy bills or funding the military commitment. But if it cannot collect that money from the people who are actually profiting, it has to collect it from everyone else, through higher taxes and cuts to public spending. Those are the people who end up among the 6.8 million now counted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as living in “very deep poverty,” the highest figure on record, as Britain heads into another round of tax rises this autumn under a government that promised, just five weeks ago, to be different. It is, in other words, the same extraction the colonies knew intimately, run now on the country that built it.

But this is not uniquely British either, even though Britain is at the center of it. The 2016 Panama Papers, still probably the most widely recognised proof that this shadow financial system exists at all, showed that the largest share of the anonymous shell companies exposed were incorporated through a single jurisdiction: the British Virgin Islands. David Cameron’s own father had money invested through a fund named in that same leak. Beyond Britain, Gulf state elites use exactly the same secrecy tools that Bermuda and the Caymans offer everyone else, so this isn’t simply the West extracting from the rest of the world. It’s a piece of financial plumbing that any sufficiently powerful person, anywhere, can plug into. The Tax Justice Network estimates that Britain and its territories enable close to a quarter of all global corporate tax avoidance, roughly $300 billion a year, pulled out of whichever country’s hospitals and schools needed it and will never see it again.

As Kojo Koram argues, none of this makes sense “without confronting the aftermath of empire.” Britain will get an eighth prime minister eventually, and probably a ninth, but changing the person at the top will not change what sits underneath them: Bermuda, the Caymans and the Bahamas still doing the work they were built to do, allowing Shell, Lloyd’s and men like Tony Blair to hold wealth that never has to answer to a tax office, while the costs that wealth should have covered, from energy subsidies and public services to the basic cost of running the country, are passed on to everyone else.

Until Britain dismantles that system rather than simply replacing the person standing in front of it, Andy Burnham’s promise to be a “circuit-breaker” is just empty words.

Who really rules the world?

For decades, the global order had a clear centre. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world’s sole superpower while liberal democracy was proclaimed history's final destination. That story is now dead.

As Western power cracks and the global economy reels from the fallout of the Iran war, the real winners are hiding in plain sight — mega-corporations more powerful than the states that host them. They profit from war no matter who wins. They're not just close to power, they're fused with it. And in some cases, they're not new players at all — just empire, rebranded.

This week on The Tea, Professor and award-winning author Kojo Karam joins us to expose the rise of corporate power, the decolonisation project that was never finished, and whether the old empire has really disappeared — or simply changed shape.

Also in the show:

⚡ Britain’s Iran Playbook — the 1950s colonial blueprint still shaping Iran today

⚡ The New War Profiteers — Saudi Aramco, BP and the Trump family: who’s cashing in?

⚡ Corporations vs States — are mega-corporations becoming more sovereign than governments?

⚡ BRICS & the Global South — a genuine shift in power, or the same interests in new places?

⚡ Reparations and the empire-nostalgia comeback

⚡ The end of the War on Drugs — A new corporate gold rush?

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Kojo Koram

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadège Bizimungu

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Research: Constance Creswell, Iman Saleh

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

Who really rules the world?

For decades, the global order had a clear centre. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world’s sole superpower while liberal democracy was proclaimed history's final destination. That story is now dead.
As Western power cracks and the global economy reels from the fallout of the Iran war, the real winners are hiding in plain sight — mega-corporations more powerful than the states that host them. They profit from war no matter who wins. They're not just close to power, they're fused with it. And in some cases, they're not new players at all — just empire, rebranded.
This week on The Tea, Professor and award-winning author Kojo Karam joins us to expose the rise of corporate power, the decolonisation project that was never finished, and whether the old empire has really disappeared — or simply changed shape.

Also in the show:
⚡ Britain’s Iran Playbook — the 1950s colonial blueprint still shaping Iran today
⚡ The New War Profiteers — Saudi Aramco, BP and the Trump family: who’s cashing in?
⚡ Corporations vs States — are mega-corporations becoming more sovereign than governments?
⚡ BRICS & the Global South — a genuine shift in power, or the same interests in new places?
⚡ Reparations and the empire-nostalgia comeback
⚡ The end of the War on Drugs — A new corporate gold rush?

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: Kojo Koram
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producer: Nadège Bizimungu
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Research: Constance Creswell, Iman Saleh
Video Editor: Max Bubnov
An MPWR Productions show.

00:00 Introduction – Has Empire Really Ended?
02:57 Kojo Koram’s Journey
05:59 The Collapse of the Western World Order
07:16 The Truth About Decolonisation
11:48 Iran and Britain’s Imperial Legacy
17:30 How British Empire Became Corporate Empire
20:24 Who’s Really Winning the Iran War?
23:32 Are Corporations More Powerful Than States?
27:00 Trump, War and Private Wealth
29:54 Are We Entering Tech Feudalism?
34:03 Why Inequality Is Returning to the West
38:17 What Can the Global South Teach Us?
40:19 Does BRICS Really Challenge Western Power?
43:14 Can Nation States Still Control Corporations?
47:29 Reparations and the Decline of British Power
53:40 The Myth of the Liberal World Order
56:18 How the War on Drugs Built American Power
01:01:08 Africa’s New Anti-Colonial Governments
01:04:45 Who Will Profit From Drug Legalisation?

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

For decades, China was presented as the authoritarian rival to the West: censored, controlled and fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy. But that story is now more co…

Read more

As trust in US leadership declines, China’s technology and culture are gaining influence worldwide. Is China challenging the West — or quietly shaping its future?

This week on The Tea, we’re joined by journalist and bestselling author Yi-Ling Liu, founding China editor of Rest of World. In her debut book, The World Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, she breaks down the contradictions behind the way China is often portrayed — and the complex reality behind the headlines.

Also in the show:

⚡ Inside China’s censorship (and self-censorship) system

⚡ Why China’s rise is exposing America’s weaknesses

⚡ The contradictions Western media often miss about China

⚡ The hidden costs behind China’s economic miracle

⚡ Behind “China-maxxing” trend

⚡YouTube influencers and the one-dimensional story about China

⚡The AI arms race: real threat or Silicon Valley narrative?

As Yi-Ling argues, China defies simple labels. It is a technological powerhouse, a deeply capitalist society — and a country still shaped by state control.

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #YiLingLiu #China #AI #capitalism #TikTokChina #ChinaMaxxing #Politics #news #currentaffairs

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Yi-Ling Liu

Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi

Producer: Nadège Bizimungu

Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs

Research: Constance Creswell, Iman Saleh

Video Editor: Max Bubnov

An MPWR Productions show.

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed by the guest(s) on The Tea YouTube series and podcast are their own and do not reflect those of MPWR Productions or its licensees. The appearance of this YouTube programme and podcast on social media platforms does not imply endorsement by MPWR Productions. MPWR Productions disclaims any liability for damages arising from the use of the podcast and its recordings to the fullest extent permissible by law.

This video is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and reflects the personal opinions of the guest and creators. The inclusion of public figures or journalists is based on publicly available information and does not imply guilt or wrongdoing.

The views in this video do not establish a professional relationship with viewers and do not constitute legal, professional, or personal advice. Viewer discretion is advised.

Four ceasefires have collapsed in five months. That’s not a failure to reach peace, it’s a war being kept alive because it enriches a small number of people, while it quietly costs America the global power it went to war to protect.

In February, standing before cameras, Trump made Americans a promise. The war against Iran would cost them nothing, he said, because America is “the largest oil producer in the world, by far” So when oil prices rise, “we make a lot of money.”

Six months later, at least some parts of that promise are no longer adding up. America keeps an emergency oil stockpile buried in salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coast the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built after the 1970s oil shocks so no president would get caught without options. It has now fallen to its lowest level since 1983. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has fired off close to half its supply of Tomahawks, the cruise missiles the U.S. military uses to strike targets from hundreds of miles away without risking a pilot, and roughly 80 percent of its total stockpile of THAAD interceptor missiles. A leaked Pentagon memo shows a senior defense official giving weapons manufacturers three weeks to submit plans for surging production, because what’s left in storage might not be enough. But experts say some of it could take three to four years to rebuild.

So far, this war has seen four attempts to end it, and four collapses, in five months. In April, Pakistan brokered a two-week ceasefire meant to buy time for talks in Islamabad, but it only held for eleven days. In June, American and Iranian negotiators went further and signed a fourteen-point deal sanctions would lift, Israeli attacks in Lebanon would stop, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Israel bombed Lebanon that same day. Iran called it a violation and walked, and within weeks the U.S. was bombing Iran for thirteen straight nights, a streak that only stopped when Washington reportedly started running low on interceptors. In response, Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz again, the waterway that around a fifth of the world’s oil passes through.

if nothing is actually being won here, why does the war keep getting close to ending without ever actually ending?

These negotiations are not simply failing because the two sides can’t reach a deal. They are being allowed to drag on in a way that continues to benefit a specific strata of society, while ordinary people are left to absorb the human and economic cost of a war that will end up costing America the same hegemony it went to war to protect.

In a recent report by Drop Site News, Iranian officials say Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his envoy to the peace talks, made close to $9 billion trading oil futures with knowledge of where the war was headed before the public did. One trade, worth $800 million, landed minutes before Trump announced a pause in the fighting. Another, worth $960 million, landed just before a ceasefire. Most recently, Trump Media launched a $100,000-a-month service called Truth API, which gives Wall Street trading firms early access milliseconds, in some cases to Trump’s posts on Truth Social before the public sees them, including posts about tariffs, foreign policy and military action. More than ten firms have reportedly signed up. An NYU Stern economist told Fortune bluntly, that “this is insider trading by definition.”

But what is certainly clear is that Trump’s own net worth has grown by more than a billion dollars since the war began. His family has taken in roughly $1.4 billion from crypto ventures over the same six months. His son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on the board of Polymarket, a betting app where users reportedly guessed the exact hour the war would start and profited from it, and holds a paid stake in a second betting company, Kalshi, which just announced it will let people bet on whether the government approves new drugs. None of that requires the insider-trading accusation to be true. It only requires noticing that a war costing the country dearly has made the president’s own family considerably richer.

There is a name for this pattern, and the journalist who has spent most of his career laying it out in forensic detail is Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times war correspondent who now publishes independently on Substack. In a recent essay, he compares this war to Trump’s failed Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, which opened in 1990 on debt no analyst thought could ever be repaid, and went bankrupt five times. Trump, by his own account, walked away having collected millions in salary and fees, while the people who lent him money lost more than $1.5 billion. His argument is that Trump runs a country the same way he ran that casino: extract what you can while it’s still standing, and let everyone else absorb the wreckage. “He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit,” Hedges writes, “while the rest of us are left bereft amid the ruins.”

But there are winners and losers in Iran too, even though that looks different. For starters, ordinary Iranians have paid for this in human life, with Iran’s Health Ministry putting the toll at 3,468 killed since the war began, but independent estimates put the broader death toll at more than 7,000 or higher. On top of that, the country is living through inflation near 90 percent and a currency that’s lost 60 percent of its value, which is mostly due to sanctions that have targeted Iran for nearly half a century, since Washington first imposed them after the 1979 hostage crisis. But the Revolutionary Guard, the branch of Iran’s military that also runs large parts of its economy, is a different story. It’s been documented smuggling oil worth an estimated $12 to $25 billion a year past those same sanctions. And in July, Reuters traced a separate $4 billion pipeline moving through an unlicensed Dubai crypto exchange linked to Iran’s central bank and to Revolutionary Guard wallets — built partly on an illegal gambling network of more than 2,000 websites.

It’s also why Tehran arguably has little reason to rush toward peace. Every extra week the war drags on is a week closer to a new, permanent source of income: transit fees on tankers passing through the Strait, which could eventually bring in close to $100 billion a year. Iran’s parliament is reportedly moving to lock that arrangement in for good, even after the fighting stops.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s biggest source of leverage, is already reshaping the region in ways that may not be reversible for years to come. Saudi Arabia recorded zero oil exports through its main shipping route this year, the first time that has happened in the kingdom’s modern history. In response, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan recently signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, a pact declaring that an attack on any one of them is an attack on all three. Washington isn’t mentioned in it. Analysts at Chatham House, a London-based foreign policy think tank, say China stands to benefit no matter how this war ends, simply because Gulf governments no longer trust an American security guarantee the way they used to.

That’s the part worth sitting with, especially if you’re reading this from outside the United States. This was never simply a story about Iran losing or Trump winning. It’s a story about something much bigger cracking: the system America built after World War II that has run the global economy for almost eighty years. Under that system, the U.S. dollar became the currency the whole world trades and saves in. The U.S. Navy controlled the world’s major oil routes, including the Strait of Hormuz, giving Washington leverage over who could move oil and when. And in 1945, the U.S. struck a deal with Saudi Arabia that locked in oil being bought and sold in dollars, everywhere, ever since. That’s the arrangement quietly being drained right now, not by Iran, but by the very people in Washington who are supposed to be holding it up. Whether or not this shifting balance of power is good for anyone, it’s ordinary people around the world who are paying the price, in higher gas and food prices and the threat of broader economic fallout. Empires rarely collapse all at once. They’re weakened gradually, through decisions that protect short-term interests while leaving ordinary people to absorb the consequences. And we are only beginning to see the long term ones emerge.

00:00:00 Introduction – Has America Already Lost the Iran War?
00:03:24 How Chris Hedges' Faith Shaped His Journalism
00:05:16 Why Hedges Says America Has Lost the War
00:10:15 Why Did Trump Go to War With Iran?
00:11:34 Israel and America Are Fighting Different Wars
00:15:33 Is the Trump–Netanyahu Rift Actually Real?
00:21:42 Why Netanyahu Can't Back Down
00:24:35 Could America Abandon Israel's War?
00:29:47 Did the War Make Iran Stronger?
00:31:53 Who Is Actually Profiting From the War?
00:34:27 Mossad, Ahmadinejad and the War's "Smoke and Mirrors"
00:37:38 Why Hedges Says There Are No Real Peace Negotiations
00:40:27 Is America's Gulf Alliance Falling Apart?
00:44:29 Are the Abraham Accords Dead?
00:45:22 Has Iran Become the Middle East's Dominant Power?
00:48:53 The Decline of American Power
00:52:25 Trump, War Profiteering and the American Economy
00:55:53 Hedges: "We Don't Live in a Functioning Democracy"
01:00:59 Could Trump Really Seek a Third Term?
01:04:09 Can the Media Still Hold Power to Account?
01:05:28 Why Hedges Believes Direct Action Is the Only Option Left

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Six months into the catastrophic US-Israeli war on Iran, Washington's stockpiles are severely depleted, oil and food prices are spiralling globally, and the Middle East is…

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Hey folks, a busy week in news again. Here are three of the top news stories which I don’t think you should miss and why…

1. UK court rules anti-Zionism ‘legally protected belief‘ - The Cradle 4/08/2026

A landmark case has established that anti-Zionism is now a protected belief under UK law, cementing antizionism as philosophical belief. The court ruling stated:

“It is coherent to describe as ‘racist’ an ideology that promotes the establishment of a state for only one race of people in a territory that formerly contained a large number of people of a different race,” going further to say “Such an ideology, which supports the migration of members of the first group into the territory with the support of an imperial power to dislodge an indigenous population, could also coherently be described as colonial and imperialistic”. The man at the center of the case is David Miller a former political sociology professor at the University of Bristol from September 2018 until October 202, who was dismissed for “gross misconduct” due to comments he made about zionism. A previous court ruling back in 2024 had already determined that Miller’s dismissal over his anti-Zionist beliefs amounted to “unlawful direct discrimination” by the university, but due to an appeal by the University of Bristol against the February 2024 tribunal ruling — this was challenged before the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT), the outcome of which has been to uphold Miller’s right to antizionist beliefs.

It might seem odd this needs stating to some of our american compatriots, but the battle over free speech here in the UK has included and continues to include attempts to legally curb criticism of the state of Israel as somehow antisemitic. This has been led by the imposition of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance)’s working definition of antisemitism which includes examples touching on Israel, and which many UK universities and public bodies have been pressured or even required to adopt. A BRISMES/European Legal Support Centre analysis of 40 cases from 2017–2022 found the definition being used to accuse university staff and students of antisemitism for criticising Israeli government policy with almost all such accusations ultimately rejected and with the report concluding the IHRA definition was “undermining academic freedom and freedom of expression.” The Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner, has said the definition is “extremely poorly worded” and “probably unactionable in law,” and conflicts with universities’ free-speech duties. Even one of the definition’s original authors, Kenneth Stern, has said it “was never intended as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus” and has opposed legislative efforts to make it binding. And yet, despite concerns raised including by those who helped draft it, the UK government’s position has been consistently supportive of the IHRA definition. In fact, in December 2016, the UK became one of the first countries to adopt the definition, and if anything, it has become more assertive about mandating it. This isn’t even a partisan position, the Labour Party has also gleefully endorsed the IHRA definition and the current (Labour) government has been pushing IHRA adoption further into public institutions, including across the NHS, a deeply contested move which the British Medical Association voted in June 2026 to revoke on free speech grounds. But as things stand, all UK police forces now use and recognise the IHRA definition, and it’s embedded in Hate Crime Operational Guidance from the College of Policing. Yes, you read that right. That partly explains all those people being harassed by police over a tweet…

This is why the Miller case is so critical to those concerned not only with the right to anti-zionist beliefs, but with free speech more broadly. It currently sets the government’s position in conflict with the Equality Act’s protections and will inevitably create further cases highlighting this concerning attempt to use anti-hate legislation to override the right to free speech and frankly freedom of conscience.

2. The Ceuta crisis - A Manufactured Far Right Photo Op

   “Ceuta crisis sparks online speculation over Israel’s role in pressuring Spain” - Middle East monitor - July 2026

It was the perfect concoction of far-right disinformation flooding our timelines and media: a toxic mix of Islam, migrants and the oft-recycled “brown hordes invading and threatening Western civilisation” trope, blasted by right-wing punditry as evidence of their repeated warnings about the threats allegedly faced by the white ‘race’ from Muslims and migrants.

Conveniently, it is also the very same story Israel uses to justify much of its own militarism in the region, playing on these notions to cement its image as the bulwark of Western civilisation in the Middle East. All the while, of course, it also claims to be native to the very same region which it apparently is required to police, because of some civilisational clash. Make it make sense.

So what actually happened in Ceuta, and what was it really about? And why were Israeli leaders such as Danny Danon seemingly so gleeful, with Trump also weighing in and using the term “invasion” to describe events which, it is worth noting, did not occur on European soil—Ceuta is a Spanish enclave on the North African coast, surrounded by Morocco.

The manufactured crisis

The events were presented as a “migration crisis”—a recurrent theme for the Right and far Right, which has focused much of the blame for Europe and the West’s social ills not on the economic plunder carried out by ever-richer elites, but on impoverished people fleeing their homes in search of a better life.

Migration is not a black-and-white story. It of course brings complications, which are also often dismissed by the Left, from housing pressures to language and cultural barriers. But the truth is that the manufactured crisis in Ceuta was not actually a story about migration. It was a story about shifting global alliances; America’s growing disdain for NATO and Europe, which has long regarded the USA as its primary ally; and, of course, a peppering of Israeli support for events that would place immense pressure on a Spanish government that has been one of the most vocal critics of the genocide in Europe.

In brief: Morocco sacrificed its own people at the altar of US-Israeli hegemony.

If this is any indication of what signing the Abraham Accords and normalising relations with Israel entails, it should serve as a cautionary lesson to regional aspirants about the kind of monkey business such ties can involve.

So what are the facts?

Between the morning of July 30 and the night of July 31, around 50,000 people entered the Spanish enclave of Ceuta within a 24-hour period—a completely unheard-of scenario. Later estimates put the number of arrivals even higher, at around 72,000. The vast majority subsequently returned to Morocco, while dozens of people died attempting the crossing.

For some context, in May 2021, more than 8,000 people entered Ceuta over roughly two days after Moroccan authorities loosened border controls. A single-day record of around 6,000 arrivals was recorded at the time, and was described as the highest such figure ever seen. The scale of the 2026 influx was therefore extraordinary.

I provide this information to illustrate what appears to have been a politically manipulated abuse of migration desperation: a mass movement of people, followed by a media spectacle designed to fuel MAGA and wider far-right fantasies for years to come. By July 31, Spain said that tens of thousands of those who had crossed had already returned to Morocco. So what crisis, exactly, are we referring to?

The Moroccans were not “arriving in Europe” in the way the images and rhetoric implied. They were crossing into a Spanish-controlled enclave on African soil, and the vast majority were returned within 48 hours—providing the requisite photoshoot and imagery for those eager to portray migration as an invasion.

The geopolitical context

The New York Times reported speaking to several Moroccans who said they had been encouraged to cross into Ceuta by Moroccan authorities. Spanish outlet El Confidencial also reported that intelligence officials believed Morocco had allowed border controls to gradually relax. Speculation intensified after social media users resurfaced articles published earlier this year by pro-Israel analysts, who argued that Israel and the United States should support Morocco’s claim to Ceuta and Melilla as a means of pressuring Spain, read punish it for its position on Gaza.

Israeli sources revealed that, in March, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, called on Morocco to organise a new “Green March” into the Spanish enclaves. Writing for the US-based Middle East Forum, Rubin suggested that Moroccans approach Ceuta and Melilla with bulldozers, cross into the territories unarmed and raise the Moroccan flag, framing the proposal as a response to what he portrayed as Spain’s ‘anti-colonial hypocrisy’ - again, read: punish Spain for its position on Gaza.

A separate article published by the Israeli outlet *Ynet* in April recommended that Israel use its influence in Washington to help Morocco “recover” Ceuta and Melilla. Of course, none of this, on its own, proves that Israel orchestrated the influx. But it does provide the wider geopolitical context in which the events unfolded: Morocco’s claims to the enclaves, rooted in a colonial era, Israel’s increasingly close relationship with Rabat, worsening relations between Morocco and Spain, and Madrid’s vocal opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The story came and went - but what remains is America’s willingness to turn on a NATO ally, Morocco’s role in the region to ‘punish’ Europeans by using its own people as pawns as part of a wider racist anti-migrant disinformation campaign and the enduring hand of the Israelis in fomenting chaos, risking lives, to put on the theatre necessary to advance its interests.

3. Trump’s Biggest Challenge to American Democracy: himself

Foreign Policy - 31/07/2026- Trump offering early access to online posts in move seen as corruption - The Guardian 01/08/26

“We are currently witnessing corruption as we have never seen before under President Trump. President Trump ran his campaign promising to fight for working- and middle-class Americans. He said he would bring costs down on Day 1. Instead, he has weaponised the office of the President to enrich himself and his family.” These are the words of Rosa DeLauro, Representative for Connecticut, but they echo the feelings of so many as we observe the Trump dynasty’s continued engorgement on access to public office. From crypto to selling access through social media, “this is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” said Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Writing about Trump’s increasingly apparent use of public office to trade proximity to him for investment in him or his businesses, the The Atlantic noted: “The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.”

The US president’s growing wealth while in office has been in the spotlight since his financial reports for 2025 were made public at the end of June. They indicated that his reported wealth had jumped from US$622 million in 2024 to US$2.2 billion in 2025, the first year of his second term. And no, that was not his salary as president.

His sons’ portfolio has collectively generated more than US$3 billion in direct government business, according to The Washington Post. From luxury “gifts” to get-out-of-jail-free cards and government handouts for friends and allies, the question at this point is surely: could the Trump corruption scandal get any bigger? And is corruption even the right word when the President appears to be engineering the entire political system to suit the aspirations of his dynasty?

Is Trump hollowing out a democratic system, fundamentally changing its nature so that it can never again resemble the aspirational framework so many cherished, despite its obvious flaws? Or is he simply laying bare what so many have done, in various and more shadowy guises, before him?

Big money unduly influencing American politics is, after all, not a new story—even if the scale is.

What is clear is that, despite the scrutiny of some outlets and organisations, corruption has rarely appeared more blatant. And with that comes the sense that Trump is not worried about being held to account—now or, presumably, in the future. Americans should therefore be confronted with the reality that, as things stand, the Trump corruption scandal is no longer only about one man. It is about the very nature of the system Americans are willing to tolerate. And the more existential question of whether the damage is even reversible at this point?

In many ways, this is the crescendo of a type of politics that has been allowed to fester from Left to Right, with the pretense of democracy offering cover for what are presented as isolated ‘anomalies’ of corruption. But when corruption becomes the norm—when it becomes the standard—the system itself stands trial.

This is certainly a defining moment for American democracy. But it may also present an opportunity to confront the rot which, although accelerated under Trump, did not begin with him.

It may be that one day we look back at this moment as the point at which Trump’s lack of subtlety, and his unwillingness to play by the rules, unveiled a defunct system that needed to be laid bare before change could come.

Now, as Americans stare down a tech-billionaire oligarchy in place of the democracy they once cherished, the question is: what strategies, from Left to Right, can be used to challenge the one issue that should unite people across the divide?

Will it?

Thanks for checking out my top stories - what do you think? Share your comments below!