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

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.

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!

Can workers take on the world’s biggest corporations — and win? For decades, corporate power seemed untouchable. But a new generation of workers is fighting back. From Amazon to Starbucks, a new generation of organisers is challenging some of the world’s most powerful companies—and winning. This week on The Tea, we’re joined by legendary labour organiser and bestselling author Chris Smalls, the man behind Amazon’s first-ever independent labour union. In his new book, When the Revolution Comes, he reveals what it really takes to challenge corporate power—and why the fight is far from over.

Also in the show: ⚡ Inside Amazon’s surveillance culture—and the two-minute mistake that got Chris fired ⚡ Why Amazon’s injury rates remain the highest in the industry ⚡ The hidden human cost behind next-day delivery ⚡ How the Amazon Labour Union forced changes without a contract ⚡ How the US labour movement is failing the working class ⚡ Crashing the Met Gala to take on Jeff Bezos ⚡ From Amazon to Gaza: Why solidarity has no borders As Chris puts it, we gave up our freedoms and handed unprecedented power to one of the richest corporations on Earth. Taking it back means rethinking where we shop and recognising our collective strength.

👉 Subscribe for independent, unfiltered conversations

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

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

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #ChrisSmalls #Amazon #WorkersRights #BigTech #AmazonUnion #Politics #CurrentAffairs #News

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 Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

The internet promised freedom. But has it delivered?

When the World Wide Web launched, it promised a borderless world of knowledge, connection and freedom.

More than three decades later, a handful of tech giants control vast parts of our digital lives—shaping what we see, what we remember, and even how we think—while the internet has become an engine of censorship and surveillance.

This week on The Tea, we're joined by the woman rewriting the history of the internet. Mindy Seu is a technologist, UCLA associate professor, and the author of “A Sexual History of the Internet”. She’s been tracking what the tech giants are scrubbing. Together, we ask the questions Big Tech would rather you didn't: Who decides what survives online? And is it still possible to reclaim the internet?
Also in the show:
⚡ The hidden history of the internet—from women, artists and activists erased from the story
⚡ Open source, local networks & the fight to reclaim the web
⚡ Sex, censorship & who gets erased online
⚡ The Epstein files & the myth of the "forever internet"
⚡ ChatGPT, AI & the danger of “yes men”
⚡ Peter Thiel’s “Praxis” and Big Tech’s attempt to replace democracy

As Mindy argues, reclaiming the internet doesn't start with Silicon Valley. It starts with local communities building alternatives from the ground up.

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #MindySeu #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #BigTech #Internet #DigitalRights #Cyberfeminism #Surveillance #AI #Tech #Podcast

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


00:00:00 Introduction – Who Really Owns the Internet?
00:02:48 The Hidden History of the Open Web
00:06:53 The Military Origins of the Internet
00:12:05 Can We Escape Big Tech? The Case for Decentralized Networks
00:19:40 How Big Tech Learned to Control Information
00:29:19 Algorithms, Politics and the Power to Shape Reality
00:35:08 The Myth That the Internet Never Forgets
00:41:39 How AI Is Replacing the Open Internet
00:47:53 Can Online Activism Still Change the World?
00:51:20 Silicon Valley's Vision for a Post-Democracy Future
00:55:15 AI Companions, Loneliness and the Future of Human Connection
00:58:53 How We Fight Back Against the New Internet

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.

Gaming is dismissed as a hobby for isolated teenage boys. In reality, it’s an information space of roughly 3.6 billion active users bigger than film and music combined and Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Steve Bannon all figured that out before Western governments did.

More people around the world play video games than follow any religion except Christianity and Islam, which sits oddly with gaming’s lingering reputation as a pastime for isolated teenage boys. According to industry analytics firm Newzoo, there are roughly 3.6 billion active gamers globally, and the industry is expected to generate around $188 billion in revenue this year, more than film and music combined. And yet, the public conversation about gaming has barely moved on. It still tends to revolve around the same handful of concerns: addiction, violence, or whether kids should be allowed anywhere near Roblox. Those are real issues, but they tell only a small part of the story. Gaming has become one of the biggest cultural spaces on the planet, and increasingly a place where governments compete for influence, shape narratives, and try to win over the next generation of players.

Games journalist George Osborn has spent years mapping exactly that shift, and in his new book, Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence, he argues that games aren’t content people consume, they’re spaces people inhabit digital versions of what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” the cafés and town squares people gather in outside home and work. Discord servers and Steam forums have become exactly that for billions of people, and whoever controls a town square gets leverage over the people in it.

Almost everyone with something to gain from that leverage has noticed. In 2023, a 16-year-old Russian streamer broadcast a Hearts of Iron IV session from inside the Wagner Group’s St Petersburg headquarters, simulating a war with NATO. RUSI has documented Russia’s Defence Ministry running gamer-targeted recruitment alongside studios glorifying Wagner’s operations in Africa. China has taken the ownership route: Tencent fully owns Riot Games and holds a roughly 28 percent stake in Epic a position significant enough that the Trump administration is now weighing forcing a divestment on national-security grounds. Saudi Arabia, where two-thirds of the population is under 35, has poured tens of billions into becoming a gaming hub, a soft-power play Western capitals were slow to register.

But it’s worth asking how distinctive gaming really is. Twitch hosts most politically-oriented live streaming, but YouTube still dominates actual political viewership among young men, who use it for political content far more than TikTok. If YouTube is doing more of the persuading, gaming’s real edge isn’t necessarily influence but rather the fact that this is a newer and far less scrutinized space than the platforms already under a microscope.

None of this is new, Osborn argues, just newly visible. In 2005, before Breitbart, Steve Bannon ran a company that farmed and sold World of Warcraft gold, eventually raising $60 million from Goldman Sachs — a formative stint inside gaming’s economy and culture. From there, Osborn traces a line to Gamergate, the 2014 harassment campaign that began with false accusations against developer Zoë Quinn and metastasized into sustained abuse of women across the industry. Bannon later recognized in that anger an army ready to be organized, saying in 2017 that young men come in through Gamergate and then get turned onto politics and Trump — a pipeline Osborn credits with helping build the modern alt-right. At its most extreme, the same subculture bled into violence which has been traced across the past decade.The Christchurch and Buffalo shooters both livestreamed their attacks in the style of first-person shooter games, even including leaderboard references. But that doesn’t mean video games caused their radicalization. Rather, gaming culture became another channel through which extremist ideas that were already circulating elsewhere could spread and take hold.

The 2024 election added a quieter case. JL Partners, among the only pollsters to correctly call Trump’s popular-vote win, ran surveys inside mobile games to reach voters who distrust traditional polling.

Osborn’s answer isn’t to have fewer games. He argues that treating gaming as inherently radicalizing misses the point of why it became such a powerful space in the first place. In 2022, he says the British government approached him about adding pro-Ukrainian messaging to a game. He turned it down, arguing that once games become a channel for state messaging, every authoritarian government has the justification it needs to do the same. His instinct is to “protect gaming the way you’d protect a free press” but I think the harder question is what that actually looks like in practice.

That gap is filling fast. Age-verification and digital-ID rules are arriving across the UK, EU and China at once, and Osborn warns some of it is surveillance dressed as safety. China’s system is the cautionary case: minors capped at three hours a week, enforced by real-name registration against a national ID database, with facial recognition to catch kids borrowing an adult’s account — and still, over three-quarters of surveyed minors evade it. Meanwhile a new class of political creators is filling the vacuum states haven’t: Hasan Piker has built a following in the millions from inside gaming culture, and the Palestinian creator Absorber, who built his audience playing Fortnite, has confronted Israeli soldiers live on stream for an audience that tunes out cable news entirely.

If governments are serious about tackling this, then “protect gaming like a free press” has to mean something concrete. It probably starts with the kind of standardized cross-platform reporting that RUSI has been calling for, especially when 43 percent of gamers who came across harmful content never reported it. It could mean making the FBI and DHS’s information-sharing arrangements with platforms like Roblox, Discord and Reddit a normal part of how these companies operate, instead of something that only comes to light through public records requests. It also means asking harder questions about foreign ownership of gaming infrastructure, in much the same way governments already scrutinize telecoms. At the same time, it means avoiding China’s approach of solving child safety by building surveillance systems that stick around long after the original problem has changed. None of that is as simple or politically satisfying as banning games or blaming gaming culture. But that’s also probably why so few governments have seriously pursued it.

The bigger lesson is that, whether we like it or not, the next fight for public opinion is no longer happening mainly on front pages or cable news. A lot of it has already moved elsewhere, and it’s happening in Discord servers, in the middle of online matches, and across digital spaces where governments, extremist movements and influencers are all competing for attention. The problem is that many of the institutions meant to defend democratic values are still looking somewhere else, focused on the scoreboard instead of the fight itself. By the time they catch up, the battle for the next generation’s attention may already have been won.

Hi all,

We started this network with a clear mission: to tackle the critical stories being ignored or sanitized by legacy media, and to expose the why behind headlines that pass for mere oddities. We all deserve better from our information ecosystem and that’s what we are here to serve.

This week, the thread connecting every headline is the weaponization of state power to silence scrutiny and its consequences on the marginalised groups from the White House assault on press freedom, to $730M Israeli PR budgets to try and sanitize a genocide, and the unprecedented political takedown of an ICC Prosecutor - we over here are wide wake. So let’s get into it.

Here is what you need to know this week.

1. Trump’s assault on the fifth pillar of democracy - a free press - continues

   .

Lawyers say threats to press freedom are growing—as are costs to defend reporters”

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/trump-lawsuits-justice-department-subpoenas-squeeze-news-outlets-f4a08768

In brief: The White House is combining multi-billion-dollar defamation suits, DOJ subpoenas, and administrative lockouts to financially drain newsrooms and punish critical reporting.

The signs of the White House’s hostility to the press have been evident for some time. Anyone who has watched recent briefings will have noticed the barely concealed disdain with which Karoline Leavitt addresses reporters, but that disdain is actually now a privilege granted only to those select journalists still afforded access to the White House briefing.

You may recall that in early 2025, the Trump administration barred Associated Press journalists and photographers from restricted spaces such as the Oval Office and Air Force One. This “punishment” was explicitly triggered by the AP’s editorial decision to retain the historical name “Gulf of Mexico” in its style guide, rather than adopt President Trump’s executive decree renaming it the “Gulf of America.”

After a federal judge ruled that targeting the AP on the basis of its editorial stance was unconstitutional, the White House shifted tactics. Instead of restoring access, it moved to strip control of the press pool away from journalists altogether. The longstanding, permanent press pool slots held by wire services were dismantled, with AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg folded into a single rotating pool, drastically curtailing the level of daily access these global news agencies have maintained for decades.

For those outside the industry, wire services are the backbone of journalism the raw material upon which much of the world’s news is built. Restricting their access does not just impact a handful of outlets; it disrupts the flow of information to millions globally.

But it did not stop there. The White House Press Office announced it would take full control over who is admitted into the presidential reporting pool a role historically managed independently by the White House Correspondents’ Association. In doing so, it replaced established outlets such as Reuters and HuffPost with right-leaning or administration-friendly media figures. The message was unmistakable: comply, or risk being shut out from the lifeblood of your profession, aka informatiom.

The punitive climate extends beyond access. Media figures who have crossed the line of challenging authority from comedians like Jimmy Kimmel to journalists such as Mehdi Hasan have faced removal, marginalisation, or cancellation. Others come to mind: Marc Lamont Hill at CNN, Briahna Joy Gray at The Hill, Sangita Myska at LBC, Steve Bell at The Guardian. Even Ayman Mohyeldin, who appeared to have weathered the storm, has now seen his solo weekend programme cancelled….

Meanwhile, during Pentagon briefings on the Iran conflict, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth openly called for an “actual, patriotic press.” For those paying attention, the direction of travel is clear: as Trump signals his intention to pursue an unconstitutional third term in 2028, the question is whether a press capable of holding power to account will still meaningfully exist.

Recent developments mark a further escalation a multi-pronged strategy involving the weaponisation of legal and state apparatus to systematically target critical journalism. This includes aggressive defamation suits and Department of Justice subpoenas that drain newsrooms financially, deployed against both legacy outlets and independent media alike. This is not incidental; it is coordinated. The aim is to control the narrative by restricting access and criminalising dissent.

You will recall the “Antifa” dragnet weeks ago, in which broad executive powers were used to designate not a formal organisation, but a loosely defined anti-fascist ideology as now “terrorist” (you can also track similar developments here in the UK with the designation of direct action group Palestine Action as ‘terrorist’). That move created a legal pretext for sweeping crackdowns on left-wing activism and now, increasingly, on those who report on it.

Under this anti=terrorist framework, independent journalists, activist media, and left-leaning outlets risk being accused of providing “material support” to terrorism simply for documenting or platforming dissenting voices. Routine editorial decisions, such as giving a voice to one of the targeted groups, are reframed as disloyalty to the state. Coverage of protest movements is recast as incitement or subversion with serious consequences not only for journalists, but for the public’s access to information itself. Overall it makes independent journalists who may closely follow, report on, or quote certain under-reported on groups, vulnerable to this new legislation.

But it isn’t just them. It’s now top journalists at major broadsheets - one journalist at the NYT had federal agents turn up at his door to serve him a subpoena, for daring to write about security concerns involving a jet gifted to the U.S. by the Qatari government that was being used as Air Force One. Although the Justice Department later agreed to withdraw the subpoena, it said its national security investigation would continue. Trump has himself sued multiple press outlets for defamation including CBS and CNN.

Whether through multi-million-dollar libel suits targeting institutions like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, or through the spectre of terrorism charges against independent reporters, the pattern is clear: financially exhaust newsrooms and criminalise scrutiny of power.

These are the unmistakable signs of a press under siege. The noose is tightening. And as the president clearly prepares NOT to step down from power in 2028, the danger in the shrinking space to confront him should alarm us all.

The next story I want to share connects to a similar growing assault on reality waged by highly funded propaganda from Israel, just as major legislative measures have expanded U.S.–Israel intelligence and military integration advanced through Congress. The Intelligence Authorization Act and the annual defense spending bill are now expanding intelligence sharing and defense-technology integration between the U.S. and Israel, placing legal limits - get this, on when that intelligence flow can be reduced (not limits on its increase - but on its decrease!). Human Rights Watch and analysts have warned that these provisions embed Israeli technology directly into U.S. weapons and data systems, creating institutional integration that bypasses standard annual congressional review. Strap in guys, this is about to get bumpy….

1. Israel dramatically increases its budget for propaganda

Israel has dramatically increased its public diplomacy and hasbara (propaganda) budget to roughly $730 million for the 2026 fiscal year, that’s nearly five times last year’s allocation, and a staggering leap from pre-2023 spending (typically around $7 million to $15 million per year ). This positions information warfare as a core national security priority for Israel, designed of course at least in part to try to reverse the stain of genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.

Will it work? Well it is a vast amount of money. And our reliance on tech based platforms for information means it does become easier to target disinformation so…. Drop Site news have already reported that Israel is paying millions to train AI chatbots how to talk about Gaza, with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence and skewing the answers we all receive. It’s beyond dystopian.

My prediction is we can expect a huge pro Israel campaign which will come in many forms, some more subtle than others eg: “The problem os Netenyahu, not Israel,” a renewed emphasis on a two state solution despite the reality on the ground belying that option and a huge push of ‘oh look how cool Israel is’ (good luck with that), but mostly it will be used where we don’t see it - like in the LLM training model above and other algorithmic steering.

The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey points to declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important economic and political ally. Its political sugar daddy if you will. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37 percent holding a favorable view. Perhaps most striking, for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support, is that 57 percent of Republicans under 50 now hold negative views of Israel. Support has also dropped sharply among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants, and Catholics. Even among American Jews, support has fallen below two-thirds. This money will go in hard on trying to reverse that.

Read more here: “Israel just quintupled its PR budget to $730 million”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-just-quintupled-its-pr-budget-to-730-million-experts-say-it-wont-work/

1. Islamophobia spiking in the uk

Perhaps not entirely disconnected from the story above given the long-standing tendency of Israeli propaganda to cast Muslims as an existential threat to the so-called Western civilisation it claims to defend, the UK is now witnessing a troubling surge in anti-Muslim hate. As a Muslim living in the UK, this fear is palpable and widespread and has mirrored growing attacks which largely go unreported. A reminder that the same day a mentally ill man attacked two jewish men in north London in April this year, he had also attacked a Muslim earlier in the day, a fact which was widely overlooked.

New data from the government’s own monitoring partner on anti-Muslim hatred reveals that one mosque is attacked every five days in Britain. Over the past year alone, more than 70 mosques have been targeted through intimidation, violence, property damage, harassment, hate speech, online abuse, and vandalism.

The Muslim Council of Britain has warned that the momentum behind these attacks is building, calling for an urgent government response. In London alone, nine mosques have been attacked, while one mosque in Birmingham has faced three separate incidents within the past 12 months. Graffiti, desecration of muslim graves, ‘isolated’ attacks on visibly muslim women and now men - the intensity of these attacks is deeply worrying, as remains the largely muted response to them.

While the government has announced £53 million in funding through its Protective Security for Mosques Scheme, many communities report waiting up to 18 months for basic measures such as CCTV or security personnel. These delays are leaving mosques and the communities they serve—exposed and vulnerable. But most clearly, the lack of attention to these incidents sends a message which profoundly damages social cohesion - about who matters, about who is deserving of protection and places the onus on communities to protect themselves from thugs who consistently and explicitly as seeking to incite civil war. Make no mistake, the far right are working to actively ignite a fire - and Muslims should not be left alone to put it out.

Read more here: One UK mosque attacked ‘every five days’, says British Muslim Trust

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/23/uk-mosque-attacks-british-muslim-trust

4. The ICC Takedown: Karim Khan Ousted

My final story relates to one we have covered on the Tea - the suspension of ICC Chief prosecutor Karim Khan who has now been removed from office in an unprecedented move, following sexual misconduct allegations . This marks the first time an ICC Chief Prosecutor has ever been removed from office.

Some of you may have seen the interview we conducted a few months ago with Karim Khan, in which we asked him about the context of these allegations that emerged shortly after he issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders for their role in the genocide in Gaza.

Khan had already been suspended in June pending a vote by the Court’s oversight body after accusations were made by a female aide. Yet notably, he was cleared of wrongdoing not once, but twice: first by an independent UN investigation, and then by a panel of three judicial experts.

In November 2024, the ICC’s governing body commissioned the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) to conduct an external inquiry to ensure neutrality. After a year-long investigation spanning over 5,000 pages of evidence and testimony, UN investigators found no factual basis for the allegations. That report was subsequently reviewed by a panel of three independent judges appointed by the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties. In March 2026, they unanimously concluded that the evidence did not establish misconduct or any breach of duty.

Despite this, the Court’s political body chose to disregard those findings and proceeded with his removal. In a highly unusual and unprecedented vote, neither Khan nor his legal counsel were permitted to be present to respond to the allegations.

All of this unfolds against a backdrop of mounting political pressure. Khan’s removal comes as the Trump administration openly threatens to dismantle the ICC.

Some of you may recall Fatou Bensouda, Khan’s predecessor, who opened a preliminary examination into Palestine and, in March 2021, formally launched a full investigation into alleged war crimes by both Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups. In 2020, the Trump administration sanctioned her freezing her US assets and banning her from entering the country. The Guardian later revealed that Israel’s intelligence chief, Yossi Cohen, allegedly led a years-long covert campaign to pressure Bensouda, including surveillance, intimidation, and threats aimed at derailing the Palestine inquiry.

Ahead of his removal, Khan himself warned publicly that he, his family, and ICC judges were facing an unprecedented campaign of intimidation directly linked to the Court’s work on Palestine.

That pressure intensified in April 2024, when Marco Rubio and 11 US senators sent a stark letter warning Khan that pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others would trigger retaliation. The letter threatened sanctions, visa bans, and the withdrawal of US support, ending with the words: “You have been warned.”

When the ICC proceeded regardless, Rubio by then US Secretary of State followed through, spearheading a campaign to dismantle the Court “brick by brick” and the US imposed sanctions, travel bans, and financial restrictions on Khan, his team, and several ICC judges. The sanctions on Karim Khan and his family remain fully in place to this day.

So what are we witnessing here? A genuine reckoning in the spirit of #MeToo or a politically charged takedown of an institution already under siege?

You decide.

The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

What if your favourite video game was spying on you?
Gaming isn't just entertainment anymore. With more than 3.5 billion players worldwide, it's become one of the most powerful cultural battlegrounds on Earth. From Beijing and Moscow to Riyadh, Washington and beyond, governments are investing billions in gaming—not just for profit, but to shape narratives and influence young audiences.

This week on The Tea, we're joined by leading video games expert and author George Osborn to expose how states, corporations and political movements are turning the games we play into the next frontier of information warfare.

Also in the show:
⚡ China's crackdown on gaming
⚡ Roblox: the world's first digital nation?
⚡ Hamza Saada and the democratisation of gaming
⚡ Gamergate: where the far-right found its voice
⚡ From Britain to Saudi Arabia and Russia: gaming as a tool of state power
⚡ Can gaming escape surveillance and political manipulation?

Gaming is no longer just about play. As our guest argues, it has become one of the defining arenas where politics, culture and power collide—and understanding it is essential to understanding the world we're living in.

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #GeorgeOsborn #Gaming #VideoGames #Politics #Geopolitics #Technology #News #CurrentAffairs #farright #USPolitics #UKPolitics

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: George Osborn
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producer: Sana Serroukh
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Research: Aliza Kayan-Ahmed and Iman Saleh
Video Editor: Max Bubnov
An MPWR Productions show.

00:00:00 Introduction – The Secret War Inside Video Games
00:02:44 Why Gaming Is One of the World's Most Powerful Cultural Forces
00:05:28 How Video Games Became the New Public Square
00:09:12 Gaming, Addiction and the Myths About Social Isolation
00:14:17 Digital IDs, Surveillance and the Future of Online Freedom
00:20:14 Roblox, Child Safety and Who Really Controls Digital Worlds
00:27:29 Gaming Influencers Are Changing Political Opinion
00:35:37 How Gaming Predicted Trump's Election Victory
00:38:17 Gamergate, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Online Right
00:46:07 How Extremists Recruit Inside Gaming Communities
00:51:33 Governments Are Weaponizing Video Games
01:08:50 Can Gaming Strengthen Democracy Instead?

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.

Read more

A Jewish mass movement that rejected the idea of a Jewish state ever existing was, for much of its history, more popular than Zionism. Here’s why almost nobody has heard of it.

Poland in the 1930s had the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the single most popular party among Jewish voters there wasn’t Zionist. It didn’t want a Jewish state at all.

It ran schools, published newspapers and even organized armed militias to defend Jewish communities. According to an analysis of Bund election results published in the Yiddish studies journal In geveb, the party won roughly 38 percent of the vote for Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections before the war, more than any single Zionist party, though the combined Zionist lists narrowly edged it out overall. Its members were fiercely opposed to Zionism and thought it was a fantasy, and they said so bluntly and often.

That party was the Jewish Labour Bund. Today, few people know its name, but at its peak it was one of the most important Jewish political movements in Europe. Its existence challenges a common idea about Jewish history: that Zionism was the only response to antisemitism. For decades, millions of Jews supported a different vision. They believed the answer was not a new country, but fighting for equality where Jews already lived.

The Bund was founded in October 1897, when thirteen young Jewish Marxists met secretly in an attic in Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire. That’s the same year Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Zionism argued that Jewish safety required leaving Europe and building a state. The Bund argued the opposite: stay, and fight for equality where Jews already lived, in solidarity with non-Jewish workers and socialist movements. The Yiddish word for this was doikayt, “hereness,” and it rejected the idea that Jewish life needed a single homeland at all.

The party grew fast, and contemporaries noticed. The Menshevik theorist Georgi Plekhanov reportedly called Jewish workers “the vanguard of the labor army in Russia.” Historian Bertram Wolfe later described the Bund as the largest and best organized body of workingmen inside the Russian empire. By 1906 its membership had reportedly reached around 40,000, briefly making it the biggest socialist organization in the empire, and by interwar Poland it had built an entire subculture: youth movements, sports clubs, a network of secular Yiddish schools. Jack Jacobs’s research on the interwar Bund treats it as a genuine mass institution, not a fringe faction.

None of this was naive pacifism. Bund militias organized armed self-defense against pogroms and antisemitic gangs on the streets of interwar Warsaw, decades before “Jewish strength” became coded as an Israeli idea. When the Nazis invaded, Bundists fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first urban revolt against Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. One of its fighters, a Bundist teenager named Lusiek Blones, was thirteen years old.

The rivalry between Bundists and Zionists ran deep, and it was rooted in a real disagreement about what antisemitism demanded of Jews. Bundists argued that if European governments were insisting Jews were foreign and should leave, then Zionism, by proposing that Jews do exactly that, was conceding the antisemites’ premise rather than refuting it. Zionists saw it differently: as a response to the repeated failure of emancipation and assimilation to protect Jews anywhere in the diaspora. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain backed a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, Bundists increasingly viewed Zionism as bound up with imperial power rather than freed from it, a colonial project underwritten by the same empires that had failed to protect Jews in the first place.

The Bund wasn’t beaten in that argument, though. It was murdered. The Holocaust wiped out the working-class Jewish communities that had sustained the party for half a century. Historian David Slucki has documented how the postwar Bund never came close to rebuilding its prewar scale, plateauing at just a few thousand members worldwide by the late 1950s. Daniel Blatman’s research on the Bund’s final years in Poland, from 1939 to 1949, traces a parallel political defeat: Stalinist repression, including the 1942 murder of Bundist leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter by Soviet secret police, finished what the Nazis had started.

Zionist institutions in Palestine, meanwhile, survived the war intact. In her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, whose account of the Bund this piece draws heavily on, argues that Zionist organizations controlled much of the rations, housing, and paperwork in the displaced-persons camps after the war, and used that leverage to funnel traumatized survivors toward Palestine. A movement with no population left to organize couldn’t compete with one that still had territory, infrastructure, and international backing behind it.

That imbalance is also why the Bund disappeared from memory rather than from relevance. It lost its people, not its argument, and a movement without survivors to carry its institutions forward simply stops being written about, no matter how large it once was.

The premise Zionism was built on, that Jewish safety requires a Jewish ethnostate, is now facing its sharpest public challenge in decades. Nearly three years into Israel’s war on Gaza, which the UN and earlier findings from Amnesty International and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have described as genocide, support for Israel has fallen sharply, including among Jews themselves. Younger American Jews are significantly less likely than older generations to see support for Israel as central to Jewish identity, while nearly half of American Jews under 35 now say they would support a single binational state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. In Britain, young Jews who identify as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist now roughly match those who identify as Zionist.Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a longtime critic of his own government, has called this the “beginning of the end of the Zionist project,” pointing to internal political fracture, international isolation, and economic strain as evidence.

For Crabapple, this shift is also personal. She spent seven years writing Here Where We Live Is Our Country, much of it while Israel’s campaign in Gaza was underway. in an interview on Democracy Now!, she said there was something almost unbearable about reconstructing the destruction of Warsaw’s Jews while watching a country invoke the Holocaust to justify what was happening in Gaza. “It broke me,” she said, “in probably ways that I have difficulty expressing.”

What this history suggests, isn’t a clean answer to the hardest questions about what a just political future looks like after decades of occupation and violence. It’s something narrower, and maybe more useful: proof that at the exact moment Jewish nationalism was taking shape, a mass, organized, genuinely popular Jewish movement existed that rejected the idea that Jewish liberation had to come at another people’s dispossession. It didn’t lose that argument. It was destroyed by fascism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist repression, and its ideas went down with it, not because they were wrong, but because there was no one left alive to keep making the case.

The Tea with Myriam François

Help build independent media that challenges power.

Was the creation of the state of Israel really the only answer to antisemitism?

For generations, Zionism has been presented as the inevitable answer to centuries of antisemitism. But what if that story leaves something important out?

Nearly three years into Israel's genocide in Gaza, support for Israel has fallen sharply across much of the Western world. More people, including many Jews, are asking questions that once seemed almost impossible to ask. Was Zionism inevitable? Were there other visions of Jewish freedom? And what can these forgotten traditions tell us about the future?

This week on The Tea, we’re joined by award-winning artist and journalist Molly Crabapple. In her New York Times bestselling book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, she resurrects the extraordinary history of the Jewish Labour Bund — a movement that imagined Jewish liberation not through a nation-state, but through solidarity, equality and the fight for justice wherever Jews lived.

Also in the show:
⚡ Nationalism vs internationalism: two competing visions of Jewish liberation
⚡ The Bund: the forgotten Jewish movement that challenged Zionism
⚡ From antisemitism to Islamophobia: the politics of scapegoating minorities
⚡ Hebrew vs Yiddish: the battle over Jewish identity and memory
⚡ After Gaza: changing views of Israel, including among many Jews
⚡ Zohran Mamdani and the legacy of Yiddish socialism
As our guest explains, the Bund story challenges the narrative we’ve inherited — and forces us to rethink identity, belonging and the fight for freedom today.

00:00 Introduction – Was Zionism the Only Jewish Future?
03:01 Why This Forgotten Jewish History Matters Today
09:05 The Bund vs Zionism: Two Competing Visions
12:14 How Political Zionism Chose Colonisation
15:06 Why the Bund Rejected the Zionist Project
19:06 Can People Belong Without an Ethno-State?
22:09 Immigration, Colonisation and the Meaning of Home
25:09 Parallels Between Antisemitism and Islamophobia
28:01 Why More Young Jews Are Rejecting Zionism
33:34 Yiddish, Identity and the Erasure of Jewish History
38:41 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Jewish Resistance
43:03 What History Teaches Us About Gaza Today
```

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #MollyCrabapple #Zionism #Gaza #genocide #Israel #Palestine #TheJewishBund #Mamdani #antizionist #journalism

AUDIO CREDITS
Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François
Guest: Molly Crabapple
Senior Producer: Sara Farolfi
Producer: Nadège Bizimungu
Assistant Producer: Poppy Jacobs
Research: Constance Creswell, Martha Missingham
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.

Read more

Why a new media bill, a fast-tracked terrorism law, and an EU court ruling are all worrying signs of a growing encroachment into what information we are allowed to access.

Subscribe now

Is some information just too dangerous for the public to have access to it? Do you believe you need a government intermediary to help you make sense of information? These questions are not as easily answered as they may seem. We are living through the age of disinformation - the deliberate attempt to lead people to believe things which are not true, just as we are also living through the age of misinformation, the non deliberate spread of falsities. In its flagship Global Risks Report, which pools research from over 1,300 global experts and policymakers, the World Economic Forum consistently identifies misinformation and disinformation as the single most critical short-term threat facing the world, ranking them higher than extreme weather events, interstate armed conflict, inflation, or economic downturns.

A 2026 Reuters study found that global trust in information has dropped to its lowest level since tracking began in 2015 with on average, only 37% of people globally state they trust the news they consume. 62% of global respondents explicitly state they are deeply concerned about their ability to separate real information from fake news on social platforms and trust in information pulled directly from social media platforms sits at an abysmal 22%. The question is, do we trust governments and institutions to be the ones separating fact from fiction and what are the risks of putting our trust in increasingly authoritarian and far right governments to promote accurate information, over propaganda. The stakes are incredibly high - not least our very ability to discern reality, to make sense of the world and to organise effectively in response to it.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to learn something, you walked into a library. You might have trusted a librarian to make some recommendations, but you could access a shelf of books on the topic at hand. You knew exactly where the information came from.

Then came the internet: a wild, sprawling reading room with no librarian and lots of grifters posing as informed bloggers. Still the range of search engines, from Mozilla to DuckDuckGo to Google meant you could access a very wide - possibly somewhat intimidating range of sources, even if many of these were culture and language specific (we were definitely not being recommended Arabic literature or Chinese intellectuals). Then AI search came along and promised to make our life easier by chewing our food for us. We could just ask a question and a magical, factual answer would emerge, already thought out and synthesized. Only that’s not quite so.

A major BBC investigation found something troubling: AI search engines routinely lean on flimsy, circular, or even fully invented references to back their claims. A Stanford study, working independently, landed on the same number: only 50 to 60 percent of sentences produced by AI search tools are actually backed by the citations attached to them. Roughly one in ten citations is pure fiction — a web page that was never built, a paper that was never written, digital hallucinations.

That should worry you on its own because so many of us are using AI search engines as short cuts for research. While they can certainly aid research - they cannot DO the research. As a team which researches our shows extensively, I can assure you of that.

But this access to increasingly normalised misinformation, is even worse when you consider the facts in context.

State-sponsored information warfare has scaled from a fringe intelligence tactic into an industrialized, multi-billion-dollar line item in national budgets. The Oxford Internet Institute documented private marketing and PR firms operating in at least 48 countries executing computational manipulation on behalf of political and state actors. They identified at least $60 million spent explicitly on hiring these private firms for coordinated social media manipulation and designated manipulation of public opinion through social media, a growing threat to democracies around the world.

While your attention span shrinks (thank you, TikTok) and our trust in the tidy “rounded-up summary” grows, the wealthiest people on the planet are quietly concentrating political and economic power, a key indicator in the social sciences of authoritarian control. And as they do, they keep a growing number struggling to achieve the basics so we have no time to look up at those eroding our democracies that make a heist on public assets.

The World Inequality Lab, co-directed by Thomas Piketty, tracked a structural shift since the 1980s: nations have grown richer, but governments have grown poorer. Net public wealth — what the state owns minus what it owes — now sits near zero or negative across most major Western economies, the UK and US included. Nearly all the wealth created in the last forty years went to the private sector, disproportionately its top 1 percent. The same 1 percent who own the platforms people now rely on to make sense of any of this. Are you seeing the issue yet…?

And now governments want a say in what should appears on our feeds. Nanny state to the rescue. Or is it? With all we know of naked corruption, the growing gap between public needs/opinion and political decision making, the rise of fascism globally, Im not certain we can trust the government or any current supranational institution to chew our food for us.

On June 23, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a worrying Green Paper “Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media”. In it, it proposed a “prominence regime” for platforms like YouTube and TikTok, whereby platforms would be legally required to rewrite their recommendation algorithms, search results, and home feeds to push content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, STV, and S4C to the top. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is huge merit to much of the journalism which has emerged from these channels - but there have also been tremendous documented failings.

Gaza, Ukraine, and yes, controversially COVID have all shown what happens when governments claim a monopoly on “the truth.” Combine the evidence of these recent legacy media ‘disinformation’ scandals with how close tech companies, far-right movements, and governments have drifted toward one another, and you’ll understand why handing any government the power to decide what counts as acceptable information should alarm us all, whatever you vote.

But sadly the growing control on information doesn’t stop at algorithms. Parliament fast-tracked the National Security (State Threats) Bill, now giving the Home Secretary the power to designate groups as terrorist organizations and criminalise anyone who “supports, assists, or obtains material benefits” from them. Sounds reasonable? Here’s the catch: “material benefit” includes information. Interview a member of a banned group, obtain their leaked documents or quote their internal publications for a story and under this law, you could go to prison. Put plainly, we can’t quote groups the government doesn’t want you to hear from or understand.

The EU followed with its own version. On July 2, the European Court of Justice expanded its interpretation of wartime sanctions to criminalise independent bloggers and ordinary internet users who share clips from sanctioned Russian state outlets — even for reporting or commentary. Digital rights groups call it exactly what it looks like: a backdoor to censorship, dressed up as a trade sanction.

Each of these examples hands control over what the rest of us are allowed to see, say, or share to bodies who think they know what we should be allowed to be exposed to. As with most things, it always starts at the fringes, the groups it is hard to object to seeing censored, those the majority don’t care to hear from anyway. But the precedent is set.

Our promise to you is to continue to dig deep into the information ocean and bring you the gems we think you need to hear. Part of the reason we’ve moved over from YT is to circumvent growing and increasingly blatant shadowbans and demonetisation. But it’s also to connect with you, our community much more directly. We need to find spaces to share concerns, engage in discussion and challenge one another as vested interests seek to keep us all at best distracted and at worst misled.

Our goal at The Tea is to serve you public-service journalism that asks the questions we cant elsewhere and to provide in-depth conversations that treat you as capable of handling complexity.

Which brings me to this week’s episode.

Is AI going to take your job? Enslave you? End the world as you know it? I sat down with Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon to find out, someone eminently qualified to answer, having been a certified genius since childhood, and someone you might recognize as the human calculator from Countdown. She founded Stemettes, the award-winning UK enterprise getting girls, young women, and non-binary people into STEM careers, and now advises a leading think tank on the future of work.

My team and I use AI every day, to speed things up, to brainstorm. But the sharp insight, the unexpected connection, the idea nobody else saw coming? That still comes from the humans in the room. I wanted to understand, with someone who has spent her career working both with human genius and cutting edge technology, what “intelligence” actually means when we are told we no longer need to think, because machines have a growing grasp of it...

Watch the episode, and tell me what you think.

Warm regards,

Dr Myriam François

AI is transforming the way we work, think and create. As machines begin outperforming humans in more tasks, the race to AGI and even superintelligence is often treated as inevitable. But is it? Or are we buying into Silicon Valley's biggest story?

This week on The Tea, we are joined by one of Britain's sharpest voices on the human impact of technology, Anne-Marie Imafidon CEO of Stemettes and trustee at the Institute for the Future of Work to unpack what AI is really changing, why intelligence is far more complex than Silicon Valley admits, and what it means to remain human in an age racing towards artificial superintelligence.

Also on the show:

⚡ AGI & the Silicon Valley narrative – AI hype or the next reality?

⚡ What human intelligence really is

⚡ AI and the future of work

⚡ Can AI agents ever become conscious?

⚡ The race to superintelligence – Who benefits?

⚡ What it means to be human in the age of AI

Despite the apocalyptic headlines, our guest argues that a dystopian future isn't preordained. AI remains a human technology, shaped by human choices. As she puts it: "Technology is that it is still democratic... You don't have to be funded by the big whoever to build alternatives."

👉 Subscribe for fearless, independent conversations

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #AnneMarieImafidon #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AGI #FutureOfWork #Technology #OpenAI #HumanIntelligence #CurrentAffairs #news

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Anne-Marie Imafidon

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.

Welcome to The Tea newsletter!

I’m so thrilled you’re here with us.

My team and I launched The Tea with Myriam Francois in November 2024 in direct response to an ongoing crisis in the media one that became painfully salient during the coverage of the genocide in Gaza. Consider this stark shift: the skewed coverage, the digital shadowbans and of course, the impact of the concentration of wealth and power on editorial lines. In 1983, 50 corporations owned 90% of US media. Today, that exact same footprint is dominated by just 6 corporate giants: Comcast, Walt Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance, Sony, and Amazon.

This consolidation isn’t just an abstract corporate ledger; it has a very specific face, and it increasingly belongs to tech billionaires treating our information ecosystem as a strategic asset to buy political immunity and policy leverage. We see this narrative cartel in action with David Ellison’s takeover of CBS News and Paramount heavily backed by his father, Oracle founder and major Trump donor Larry Ellison, who famously leveraged Oracle’s cloud infrastructure to secure a massive stake in TikTok’s US operations. If you’ve followed the Bari Weiss debacle at CBS you can see the impact of this in real time.

This sits alongside Elon Musk’s weaponization of X, a platform he has used to amplify his immense political influence, which culminated in his appointment to spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump giving a single billionaire unprecedented, de facto authority to audit federal agencies and dismantle the state from within. It continues with Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post which serves as a highly effective shield for Amazon’s multi-billion-dollar CIA and Pentagon cloud contracts and the quiet acquisition of legacy titles like Time, The Atlantic, and CNN by billionaire powerbrokers like Marc Benioff, Laurene Powell Jobs, and John Malone. Whether it is Powell Jobs bankrolling the centrist Democratic establishment while steering the ideological parameters of The Atlantic, Benioff using Time to lobby world leaders on the Davos agenda, or right-wing mega-donor John Malone explicitly forcing CNN to soften its adversarial edge, the motive remains identical. When the primary watchdogs of political and corporate accountability are bought up like luxury vanity assets by the wealthiest individuals in human history, independent journalism ceases to be a public service and instead becomes a defensive shield for the ruling class.

The people driving these massive media takeovers are rarely concerned with the interests of the public, with democracy, or with accountability. In fact, in many cases, they are deeply embedded in the very political structures that we need to hold to account.

The mandate for our work at The Tea is simple: public service journalism. This means creating mission-driven content that prioritizes the information needs of our communities and our democracy over commercial profit or government interests. We believe in identifying the defining issues of our time and pinning down the best people to “spill” the truth on them, arming you with the knowledge required to make a change.

Make no mistake, change is non-negotiable. We find ourselves trapped in a constant crisis cycle from all angles from the economy to the climate, driven by polarization and hyper-surveillance. We simply cannot go down like this. The best way to confront this moment is to truly understand it.

However, we also know that we are all completely saturated in content, much of it incredibly depressing. Our goal isn’t just to inform; it is also to entertain. We want to provide you with new formats that make the exercise of digesting this world and its complexities just a little easier to swallow. You, of course, will be the ultimate judge of our success on that front!

The War on Reality

To put it plainly, it is a terrible time to be a journalist. 2025 marked the deadliest year for press fatalities since the Committee for the Protection of Journalists began collecting data more than 30 years ago. It was the second consecutive year-on-year record for press deaths, with Israel responsible for two-thirds of all press killings across both 2024 and 2025.

I connect these targeted killings directly to a broader, global attack on press freedom. When journalists on the ground are murdered, we aren’t just losing facts we are losing the eyewitnesses who provide the shared architecture required to understand reality. Without them, we become far easier to manipulate, disorient, and prime for the empty promises of a strongman leader who claims to have all the answers.

Funding for independent journalism is crashing at the exact moment journalists are being killed at historic rates. We cannot separate these economic realities from the assault on our sense of truth. The elimination of on-the-ground storytellers occurs alongside the rise of technologies designed to manipulate our understanding of events within carefully curated digital spaces posing as neutral platforms. Taken together, this is a coordinated attempt to reengineer the very structures of our reality. It forces us to constantly ask: Who can be trusted? What is truth? What is real?

The Techno-Autocrats Reading Your Mind

Remember, the images and stories you consume are engineered by privately owned companies led by profit-driven techno-autocrats. These are men and it is predominantly men who have openly flaunted their hostility to democracy and manifest their disdain for our privacy daily.

Look at billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who famously declared that “freedom and democracy have become incompatible” and voiced opposition to women’s suffrage. Look at Elon Musk, who addressed a far-right rally in central London, sharing a stage with a convicted criminal to tell the audience: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Their control extends far beyond images or content; it lies in how that content is delivered to your individually studied psyche. They have spent years accumulating data on the smallest minutiae of your intimate thoughts and beliefs. They know what you look at when no one else is watching, who you DM secretly, which stories you like, and which posts you archive.

For years, we joked that talking about toothpaste would trigger an immediate toothpaste ad on our feeds, while tech companies insisted they weren’t listening through our phone microphones. Turns out they were, and still are. But the reality in 2026 is much worse. Apple recently acquired an Israeli startup whose technology enables the analysis of “silent speech.” It tracks facial skin micro-movements and biometric signals like skin vibrations, lip movements, and micro-expressions to interpret speech without a user ever making a sound. It essentially decodes your internal monologue. You heard that right. If you’ve noticed specific items popping up on your feed the moment you think about them, ask yourself: is it a coincidence? You tell me.

Reclaiming the Analog World

The point of this is to sound the alarm on the disintegration of journalism. The pursuit of impartial knowledge in service of the public is being hijacked by private interests where it survives, or defunded out of existence where it challenges power. Simultaneously, we are facing a relentless assault on our sense of reality in the spaces we spend the most time: online. If you are Gen Z or a Millennial, that’s between 5 to 7 hours a day, and it’s rising rapidly for Generation Alpha.

The distinction between the analog and digital worlds has blurred to a dangerous degree. Surgeons now report patients requesting facial surgery to match their digital filters demanding looks that appear entirely unnatural offline simply because that specific aesthetic is rewarded by the algorithm.

How many of us now interact more frequently with a digital community than our real-world neighbors or families? How many of us anchor our self-esteem to a perceived digital identity over our real-world existence?

This matters deeply. As we continue to migrate into total technological integration, we must remain acutely aware that our grasp on reality itself is under siege. The time we have left to identify reliable sources of information and support platforms dedicated to public service journalism is shrinking.

A year and a half ago, I set up The Tea network to help fill this vacuum. I can’t fill it alone, of course. But in the midst of a shrinking space for free thought and a corporate stranglehold on our senses, we must begin to carve out a brave, independent new world together.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

Myriam Francois

The Tea

Rising inequalities. Endless austerity. Genocide. Permanent war. Climate collapse. AI-driven job losses. For best-selling author and economist Clara Mattei, these aren't failures of capitalism—they're the system working exactly as designed.

This week on The Tea, Mattei joins us to challenge one of the most powerful assumptions of our time: that there is no alternative. Drawing from her new book, Escape from Capitalism, Mattei argues that capitalism isn't natural or inevitable. It has always depended on political intervention, economic precarity, and the violent suppression of alternatives to keep itself alive.

If today's crises feel permanent, this is because they're built into the model.

Also in the show:

⚡ BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street & the concentration of global wealth

⚡ Billionaires' growing obsession with land grabbing

⚡ China's hybrid model explained

⚡ Militarism - The beating heart of capitalism

⚡ Scandinavia and the myth of "humane capitalism"

⚡ Palestine as a lens on how austerity, militarisation, and state power converge

⚡ AI, automation & the loss of control

⚡ What would it take to build a better economic system?

If capitalism is functioning exactly as intended, the question isn't how to fix it—but how we can get out of this trap and build a better system.

👉 Subscribe for fearless, independent conversations.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

#TheTeaWithMyriamFrancois #ClaraMattei #Capitalism #Inequality #Economics #news #AI #UKPolitics #USPolitics #Billionaires #genocide

Check out the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (FREE)

https://www.freefreeforum.org/about

Head here to check the FREE podcast

https://www.youtube.com/@UCimEsFacMz1lz6m6_MFgnmg

AUDIO CREDITS

Presenter–Producer: Dr. Myriam François

Guest: Clara Mattei

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.

Read more

A recent viral TikTok video by a 19-year-old woman named Ava has been viewed millions of times. “I’m a 19-year-old wife, married, no degree, no 9-to-5, and I am exactly where I want to be,” she tells her followers, before describing a life centred on her husband, her home and the family she hopes to build. The backlash was immediate. Most feminist critics online saw it as evidence that young women are increasingly embracing tradwife content and questioned why an almost teenage girl with no independent income could ever truly be secure or free. In response, some of Ava’s supporters accused feminists of looking down on women who do not necessarily see careers, professional success or climbing the corporate ladder as the highest form of liberation.

The panic surrounding tradwives has become so familiar that it is often treated as one of the most defining feminist questions of our time. Yet there is remarkably little evidence that large numbers of women are abandoning feminism for traditional gender roles. A 2025 King’s College London and Ipsos survey across 29 countries found that Gen Z men and women are more divided on feminism and women’s rights than any other generation surveyed: 53% of Gen Z women identified as feminists, compared with just 32% of Gen Z men. If anything, the findings suggest that one of the most significant political developments of recent years is not a mass rejection of feminism by young women but a growing ideological divide between young men and women.

Read more