If you follow me on social media, it will come as no surprise that I’m dedicating this week’s newsletter to the French protests, which are unfolding against a backdrop of unrest across the world: in Spain over rents, in Germany over the draft, anti-fascists marches in Brasil, the cockroach movement in India, in the UK over the proscription of Palestine Action, through to New York, where another ICE shooting, this time of a father in front of his five-year-old child, has once again sparked public fury. And all of this against the wider pan European protests from Turin to Dublin which occurred this weekend, including over 250,000 marching through London against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Throughout all these protests, over different social and economic issues, in countries separated by thousands of miles, by language and culture, one common symbol can be found throughout, as conspicuous today as as the peace flag was to another generation: the palestinian flag.

Symbols of Palestinian solidarity run as a guiding thread through all these protests and it should come as no surprise. Palestine today has come to represent not only the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom and statehood, but a galvanising symbol of resistance to oppression, a nod the David vs Goliath struggles of the people against militarised repression, surveillance and state violence, and a recognition of the convergence of struggles for human dignity and liberation.

But the dots don’t connect only at the symbolic level of the keffiyeh or the Palestinian flag.

The images of violence coming out of France have felt eerily familiar - the violence against terrorised children. A militarised police force facing off with unarmed civilians. Children being shot and losing limbs and eyes. Sexual assault. The disconnect between our social media feeds and the news. The gaslighting of protestors in interviews. The seeming impunity of officers boasting about causing harm caught on camera or using racist language without apparent fear of sanction. Many of the images were triggering reminders of just how close we all are to the types of violence we have watched unleashed on the occupied Palestinians for decades, but also in recent years, on protestors standing in solidarity with them at Columbia university or protestors on the streets of Germany and beyond.

But it isn’t just the state violence which has reinforced these parallels. There has also been the gap - the chasm even, between official public discourse, from politicians and legacy media around the french protestors, presenting them as dangerous and feral, and the reality on the ground of young people demanding dignity and equal rights. The students message has been simple and clear throughout: our schools are understaffed, under equipped and dilapidated, compromising our health and our ability to achieve equal educational outcomes to students in wealthier areas.

For its part, the French government initially referred to the protests as “urban unrest”, and the media focused heavily on images of sporadic clashes, rather than on the young people at the heart of these events, framing them instead as ‘public-order’ problem rather than a political or social crisis.

This media focus on isolated incidents of violence fulled inane debates about immigration and lawlessness, which sought to situate the source of the unrest in the racial background of some protestors, rather than on their underlying grievances.

In a pattern reminiscient of the upside down coverage which characterised the genocide, the gap between the abysmal news from billionaire bought legacy media outlets contrasted starkly with Palestinian journalists, as well as so-called ‘citizen journalists’, documenting their realities on the ground, betraying an editorial misrepresentation of facts which provided the ideological cover for official government posturing. In France today, over 80% of France’s national daily press, major private television channels, and news radio networks are controlled by roughly nine French billionaires and industrial groups.

The resurgence of this gap has reinforced the sense of parallel struggles, and confirmed the growing lack of trust in legacy media outlets, whose function is meant to be to act with distance and necessary accountability of power, as the fifth column of our democracies, not as its mouthpiece. Instead, young people who described living through a ‘war’ on their streets, were treated as violent instigators of the harm they were experiencing.

Where the Palestinians have long been depicted as ‘violent muslims extremists’ (despite many not even being muslim..), the french working class in urban suburbs has seen similar propaganda techniques used to represent them as foreign, immigrant and dangerous, fuelling decades of far right fodder which shifted public debates away from very concrete social and economic issues of inequality toward the increasingly normalised Far-Right idea of the ‘great replacement’, that immigrant populations are being ‘used’ to replace the ‘native’ populations of Europe. It’s an idea which while officially critiqued by Macron and his government, has found new expression in the term ‘ensauvagement’ or ‘Savage-ification” which many critics say carries similar connotations and has been used to describe the recent protests. These were not students bolstering teacher demands for decent working conditions in education, both the government and media chimed, they were unruly ‘savages’ who needed to be put down by ‘any means necessary’, the very ‘carte blanche’ which the minister of interior gave to the police in his instructions on how to deal with the students. And free reign was exactly what was unleashed on France’s children.

Videos circulating online show violent masked officers refusing to give their ID numbers, despite this being required by law, using racist or sexist language, one clip shows an officer strangling a 14-year-old girl as she cries in pain; a 14-year-old boy shot in the face at close range, shattering his jaw; an officer allegedly boasts of having blinded students with his launcher, a boy is held underwater by an officer who believes he is out of sight, one boy claims he was shot in the arms and has lost his hand, and a teenager is tasered in the face as he walks away peacefully. These are just a snapshot of the violence France’s children have received as a response to a call for better educational facilities.

The CRS police have a long history of excessive violence, and in the poorer suburbs their impunity and lack of accountability are widely understood features of a police force whose role is not to protect people but to ‘maintain law and order’. French police have been linked to the suspicious deaths in custody and assaults of a litany of predominantly Black and brown men, whose families continue to seek justice to this day. And today, France is among a small number of European countries whose police routinely deploy LBDs — often known by the older name “flashball” — as well as sting-ball grenades and other lethal weapons. Human rights reports have documented severe, life-altering and sometimes fatal injuries caused by LBDs. These lethal weapons, or ‘weapons of war’ as one politician called them, are capable of maiming and even killing and recent weeks have seen serious life altering injuries meted out to France’s kids.

To add insult to literal injury, the French parliament is currently considering a law that would grant police further impunity by establishing an automatic presumption of self-defence for officers. If an officer uses force or fires a weapon on duty, the law would treat them as having acted lawfully and in self-defence, shifting the burden onto victims to prove otherwise. Given the images we have seen in recent weeks, it is easy to see why many are outraged.

Just as throughout the Gaza genocide, the TV said one thing, while our phones showed another, throughout the french protests, Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram revealed a reality on the ground which challenged the official narrative. These clips did not show violent anger, for the most party they showed a highly politicised, humorous generation of teenagers with moral clarity about the issues affecting them, laying bare the impact of budget cuts on public services.

In true Gen Z tradition, and as seen in protests across the world, young people used viral trends to mock and turn to derision attempts to present them as either feckless, naive or violent. Even before this wave of protests, students were using the ‘of course’ trend where creators make self aware statements about themselves, to highlight their broken ceilings, lack of desks, flooded and freezing classrooms, “I’m a student in the ‘93 (poor neighbourhood) - of course we have rats running down our corridors”. But other trends were now being used to mock power more directly. A teen in a unicorn costume dances in front of a wall of armed and angry officers. Another does the shoot dance from fortnite on the backdrop of a barrage of armed officers with shields and helmets. An influencer films her makeup tutorial in the midst of the chaos, telling officers they are ruining her shot, or the use of the ‘Who’s Most Likely To” trend, typically done between a couple or friends, where protestors ask a hapless officer ‘who’s the jealous one’ as he stands ominously over a 15 year old in stitches. Their slogans too speak to a generation wide awake and steeped in the culture of irony. Their politically astute placards stand as flippant rebukes of the widely circulated claim the students are naive puppets of left wing political machinations— “35 per classroom, but the issue is the headscarf”; “Too young to vote, but young enough to be gassed”; “The state is pissing on us and the media tells us it’s raining”; or my personal favourite, “Only trash cries over burnt bins”. One slogan “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres” roughly translated “In the name of God, it’s darkness / pure chaos” has become a core satirical meme and rally cry after the phrase originated from leaked screenshots of Snapchat and WhatsApp organizing groups where police officers allegedly tried to pose as Muslim students in order to gather intelligence on upcoming blockades. It now features in rap tracks, on major banners and in a litany of viral videos mocking the police for their on the nose tactics.

But the social media resistance didn’t stop at mocking power - it also involved reshaping their own narrative beyond the headlines. Young began filming themselves and their speeches, referencing French revolutionary history or philosophers to denounce an inequality they had been raised to believe was antithetical, at least in principle, to the foundational values of the country of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. These viral speeches challenged the narrative the teens were being politically manipulated, instead betraying a profound understanding of not only Republican values, but of the disconnect between the promises of the republic and their lived realities.

Just as the convergence of struggles also began to be represented in the Palestine solidarity movement through the presence of the Black, LGBTQ+, feminist and other groups alongside Palestinians, here too, social media began to show us scenes which fundamentally challenged the far-right’s grip on legacy media characterisation of the suburbs, as somehow in conflict with the wider French population. Many older people, generations long cast as afraid or opposed to the diversity of the youth, came out to support the teens, saying they had lived through the iconic french student protests of May 1968, the last major youth protest of this scale, or simply admired the young people and wanted to back their cause. One iconic clip showed an elderly white man on his mobility scooter, accompanied by a cheering group of masked, diverse young men in tracksuits riding on the back, gleefully leading them through the streets of Paris, very clearly living his best life. Others showed young people trying to usher elderly people struggling to breath due to the tear gas being ushered to safety or simply handing out hugs.

Despite the media bias, polls show that nearly three in four French people, consider the students’ demands legitimate, a picture of national unity which fundamentally challenges the divisions along racial lines which both the Right and Far Right, as well as much of the media has represented as France’s primary faultlines. Instead, the diverse youth of the new french republic are seen chanting the national anthem, waving the french flag and quoting 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille, as they embody the values of the very Republic they were told they rejected. This harnessing of the symbols of the republic has seen the young people rally a wide breadth of French society, from firefighters to nurses, as well as the Gilets Jaunes and farmers who have previously led their own nationwide protests movements, forming one of the largest movements in modern French history. These historic gatherings of hundreds of thousands have also been used to reassert ownership of the values and history of the Republic, as young people affirm not only their grasp on French revolutionary history but on their right to reimagine its principles in opposition to power. Paris’s Place de la Bastille is for example a site that carries the memory of the 1789 Revolution, when the people gathered before they stormed the Bastille prison and the Palace after the elites famously (although perhaps not accurately) told the starving people “Let them eat cake.”

As France battles its students over desks and toilet paper, a leaked report suggests anywhere between 13,000 and 50,000 millionaires in France don’t pay any tax on their income, while a single state dinner held at the Palace of Versailles for King Charles III cost €474,851.

After nearly a decade in power, President Macron has presided over the neoliberal gutting of many of the social structures so many French people are profoundly proud of. Once known for its rigorous academic standards and comprehensive curriculum, French education has seen more than 4,000 teaching posts slated for cuts in 2026 alone, alongside deep pressure on the education budget, pressures that have fallen unequally on secondary schools in poorer neighbourhoods.

Just as the elites in French school textbooks ignored the population starving at their gates and instead sought to unleash violent repression, the young people studying that history today are not blind to the parallels, nor the lessons internalised by all French people, the right of the people to confront power where it fails to heed them.

Despite some concessions emerging, such as 3000 teachers being allocated to cover the problem of absentee teachers, violence has continued to be the dominant response to the republic’s children.

There have been over 6,877 arrests and police custodies since the movement began, according to the French Justice Ministry — 86 per cent of them minors, meaning 14 to 17years old. Some young people were reportedly identified and picked up from home using facial-recognition technology, and there are reports of further abuse in police cells. For some sense of scale, there have been proportionally more arrests in recent weeks than during comparable large protests such as the Gilets Jaunes movement in 2018, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets over fuel-tax rises and around 10,000 people were arrested over the course of an entire year.

For its part, the government has been conspicuously absent from the street, despite ministers meeting with protesters at other major demonstrations. While Macron has focused on law and order, calls for the resignation of the education minister, as well as Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, have become central demands, in the face of what many regard as an institutional insult not only to children, but to the very values of the Republic they have come to embody.

Here again, the echos of the Palestine movement are plain to see. This generation’s political awakening has occurred against the backdrop of the cognitive dissonance between western proclaimed values of human rights and international law and the decisions by many European governments to continue to trade with, sell weapons to and even welcome Netenyahu on European soil throughout the genocide. That disillusionment has now carried over to other struggles, where there seems to be a growing recognition that the people themselves are going to be required to embody the values the governments have seemingly abandoned. And where the symbol of the keffiyeh takes its full meaning.

What governments seem to be awakening to far too slowly, is that once people no longer believe the social contract in a democracy exists, and this has been in question for a long time, the rules of political engagement shift too. People will only rely on the ballot box if they believe it can effect change and the growing movement of street politics in recent years suggests that connection is already broken. If in addition to that, public protests become sites of inherent violent confrontation with government forces, then the legitimacy of the reigning order itself begins to crumble.

What’s striking in the French protests is that the evidence of the broken political contract now spans class and even political allegiance. While the protests began in the poorer suburbs, wealthier central Paris schools, including the highly selective Lycée Henri-IV, have joined in solidarity, followed by universities, including some of France’s most conservative institutions, long immune to protest and typically linked to the political right, such as Catholic universities and elite engineering schools. It also convened social classes across class cleavages, with lawyers and professors joining the nurses, teachers and other frontline staff who’d already come out in support of the students. And with the recent arrival of Greta Thunberg in her keffiyeh, it has arguably now gone international.

As with Palestine, the sites of protest are also dissolving false binaries. In the same way that the antisemitic charge was harder to uphold when so many Jewish people were front and centre of the marches for Palestine, or representation of the Palestinian cause as as fringe arab or muslim issue dissolved in the face of so many white families marching, here too the marches have challenged the Far right/ Right’s claim of a society divided primarily along racial lines. Instead, what has emerged is the unifying power of democratic, republican values, where the principles and ideals of marching citizens are recognised as their primary marker of solidarity, over and above the racial lines previously drawn and consistently reinforced as most salient. Arguably there is nothing frencher than what these students, many of diverse backgrounds, are doing right now in asserting their rights as republican citizens and this fundamentally challenges the Far Right’s grip on the story of the nation and the roots of its decay.

As with Palestine, the shift is visible and palpable, but what happens with this energy is the question many are asking. Where to from here?

On October 17th, a massive nation wide protests is planned which will coalesce the struggles of multiple sectors - one activist told French tv the plan was to block the roads, the ports and gas stations, that 30% of police officers would call in sick in the South and firefighters are also alleged to be joining. If he’s right, the 17th of October which also commemorates one of the deadliest state-sanctioned massacres in modern Western European history, known as the 1961 Paris Massacre, in which hundreds of Algerian protestors were murdered, many drowned in the Seine, is likely to be a day of protest of historic proportions.

Governments around the world are on high alert as they observe a coalescing of groups and forces previously pitted against one another. Many have also learned the lessons of previous failed movements. Gilet Jaunes activists have provided a sobering reminder that despite a year of disruptions on their end, and some limited concessions, including scrapping the then proposed increase on eco-taxes, which was the original catalyst for the protests, an increase of minimum wage and repealing a scheduled tax increase on pensions, other demands which spoke to more profound institutional reforms to the democratic process and a return of the wealth tax were ignored. The question for those who take to the streets on the 17th will be what exactly these coalesced demands are and who will be authorised to negotiate them.

Vincent Bevins, our guest this week on the show, is a journalist whose recent book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, looks at why a historic surge of mass, leaderless protest movements across the globe ultimately failed to achieve their goals, or worse, produced results opposite to what demonstrators intended. We hope it will spark useful conversations on the ‘where to from here’ question which this moment poses from Paris to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and beyond.

The Palestine solidarity movement, far from being solely about the liberation of Palestine, has come to represent the convergence of struggles: the right to dignity and resistance for all, and a reminder of the fundamental unity of people’s basic aspirations. But as people rise up around the world, the question must today be how to turn people power in the streets, into people power in government and crucially, how to avoid these moments being hijacked by those who’ve considered these questions most ardently and been preparing in the shadows to seize this opportunity. Power to the people always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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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

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

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.

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There is nothing voluntary about leaving a place where hospitals have been destroyed, doctors have been detained or killed, medicine is running out and thousands of patients are unable to access treatment that exists only a few kilometres beyond a sealed border.

Yet this is the language Israeli officials increasingly use when discussing the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. In recent months, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has reiterated support for what he calls the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from the territory, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken about expanding Israeli military control over large parts of Gaza This framing turns ethnic cleansing into a matter of personal choice, obscuring the extent to which Israel has spent years systematically dismantling the conditions that allow Palestinians to remain in Gaza in the first place, particularly through the destruction of its healthcare system.

This is the subject of our conversation this week with Norwegian emergency physician Mads Gilbert, who has worked alongside Palestinian doctors for more than four decades. Gilbert first arrived in Gaza during the First Intifada and later became one of the most recognisable international medical voices documenting Israeli assaults on the territory. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, when Israel barred most foreign journalists from entering Gaza, his reports from Al-Shifa Hospital became one of the few accounts reaching audiences globally.The conclusion he drew from those experiences is one he has spent years returning to: Israel’s attacks on hospitals are not simply about the immediate casualties they produce. They are part of a broader ethnic cleansing project that seeks to make Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.

For more than sixteen years, before October 7th, Israel’s blockade restricted the movement of people and goods into and out of the besieged Gaza strip, shaping almost every aspect of life, including healthcare. Patients requiring specialist treatment unavailable in Gaza often needed Israeli permits to leave. According to the World Health Organisation, one in five patient permit applications in December 2022 was either delayed or denied, including requests from cancer patients, cardiac patients and children requiring specialised care. Access to chemotherapy, surgery or advanced diagnostics was often dependent on Israeli approval rather than medical need alone. The blockade also restricted the import of equipment, spare parts and materials needed to maintain hospitals and medical infrastructure.

Medical workers have also been targeted long before October 2023. During the Great March of Return protests in 2018, Israeli forces killed 21-year-old volunteer medic Razan al-Najjar while she was treating wounded protesters near the fence. Earlier that year, paramedic Musa Abu Hassanin was shot and killed while assisting the injured. Even at the time, these incidents reflected a broader pattern in which Israeli forces repeatedly targeted ambulances, healthcare workers and patients, despite the protection afforded to them under international humanitarian law.

What Israel has done to Gaza’s healthcare system since October 2023 represents an escalation of that pattern on an extraordinary scale. By August 2025, the World Health Organisation reported that Israeli attacks had damaged 34 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. Médecins Sans Frontières has gone further to describe Gaza’s healthcare system as being “systematically dismantled, while WHO officials have repeatedly warned that it is approaching collapse.

The assault has extended far beyond buildings, targeting the very people responsible for keeping the system functioning. Dr Adnan al-Bursh, head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, died in Israeli detention in 2024. Before his death, he had reportedly been beaten in prison, with his body showing signs of torture. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, remains imprisoned after Israeli forces raided the hospital and detained him in December 2024. This week, he appeared by video link at an Israeli Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem, where relatives said he showed visible signs of torture and severe physical decline, underscoring growing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian healthcare workers in Israeli detention.

These cases matter not just because they reveal the suffering of individual doctors, but because they also represent the removal of some of Gaza’s most experienced medical professionals at the very moment they are needed most. Hospitals cannot function without people. By killing, imprisoning or disabling senior clinicians and hospital leaders, Israel is deliberately hollowing out the expertise needed to sustain healthcare during genocide and erasing expertise that often takes decades to build.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians continue to wait for treatment that cannot be provided inside Gaza. According to the UN, more than 18,500 patients, including approximately 3,800 children, currently require urgent medical evacuation for life-saving care unavailable in the territory. In February, Save the Children warned that at the existing rate of evacuations, it would take more than four years for all those requiring urgent treatment to leave Gaza. The organisation reported that more than 1,200 patients had already died while waiting for permission to access medical care elsewhere.

Taken individually, a denied permit, a destroyed hospital, a detained doctor or a patient unable to access care might appear as separate developments. But healthcare, especially during Genocide, is what makes it possible to manage chronic illness, survive cancer, receive emergency surgery, give birth safely and recover from injury. Once those systems disappear, the consequences extend far beyond the immediate victims. Entire communities begin to lose the conditions necessary for life itself.

This is why the destruction of healthcare cannot be understood as a secondary consequence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Under the Genocide Convention, genocide includes the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group in whole or in part. The International Court of Justice has recognised the plausibility of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, while a UN Special Committee concluded that Israel’s methods of warfare in Gaza were consistent with the characteristics of genocide. The destruction of hospitals, the restriction of medical care, the targeting of healthcare workers and the prevention of medical evacuations must be understood within that context.

This is also why discussions of “voluntary migration” deserve far greater scrutiny than they usually receive. By the time Israeli ministers began openly discussing the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, Israel had already destroyed much of the infrastructure that allowed Palestinians to remain there. The assault on Gaza’s healthcare system is not separate from that project. When hospitals are destroyed, doctors imprisoned, medical evacuations blocked and essential treatment rendered inaccessible, displacement ceases to be a freely made decision. The destruction of healthcare is therefore not only one of the ways Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza, but part of the broader project of ethnic cleansing, which creates conditions intended to push Palestinians from their land while presenting their displacement as a choice.

Uygur, the founder of The Young Turks, and his nephew Piker, one of the world’s most watched political streamers, were due to speak at SXSW London and the Oxford Union, not at some underground militia gathering. They were not accused of planning violence. They were not travelling to organise unrest. According to The Guardian, their electronic travel authorisations were cancelled after political pressure, including from Labour MP David Taylor, who had called for Piker to be prevented from speaking. Uygur said he was told he posed a “serious risk to public order” because of his criticism of Israel, including his argument that pro-Israel lobbying shapes American politics.

But what exactly is it about what Uygur and Piker have to say that is so dangerous? And how did criticism of Israel, a foreign state, become something the British government treats as a threat to public order?

Defenders of the ban will say Britain has also barred far-right figures, which is a fair argument. In April and May, the Home Office barred far-right activist Valentina Gomez and several other foreign far-right activists from entering Britain to attend Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally. But the distinction here is that Gomez is not just “controversial”. She has, among other things, called Muslims terrorists, campaigned to “kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas”, burned a Quran with a flamethrower while declaring she would “end Islam in Texas”, and was travelling to the UK to address a street movement built around anti-Muslim grievance, led by Robinsion, a convicted criminal with a record of violent engagement with the police. Other banned figures include Dutch far-right influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who has promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and “remigration” policies, and Dominik Tarczyński, a Polish Member of the European Parliament known for his hardline anti-immigration views.

It is fair to draw the line at organised racist mobilisation, particularly when it is attached to movements that portray minorities as an existential threat to the nation and encourage violence towards Muslims and migrants. But that is precisely why the Cenk and Hasan ban is so revealing. The state is taking a power first presented as a shield against fascistic agitation and stretching it over anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine speech. It is collapsing the distinction between inciting hatred against a minority and criticising a state committing mass violence with Western support. Once that distinction goes, there is nothing stopping the government from labelling almost any form of dissent a threat.

But contrary to popular belief, none of this is new. Historically, western democracy has always had an exception clause. It was there when colonial subjects were denied the rights Europeans claimed for themselves. It was there when anti-apartheid activists in Britain were secretly monitored by Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, with files kept on meetings, leaflets and campaigns against South African apartheid. It was there when Nelson Mandela and the ANC were still on US terrorism watch lists until 2008, more than a decade after apartheid had ended. It was there during McCarthyism in the 1950s, when suspected communists, trade unionists, artists and political dissidents were blacklisted, surveilled and portrayed as threats to the nation rather than citizens with legitimate political demands. Most importantly, it was there during the Iraq War, when critics of an illegal invasion were smeared as unpatriotic, blacklisted, and accused of giving comfort to “America’s enemies.”

But Palestine has exposed something even more troubling. When Britain and the United States invaded Iraq, the political establishment closed ranks behind a disastrous war, but there were still powerful institutions willing to challenge it. Newspapers splashed leaked government documents across their front pages, and some outlets, including the New York Times, admitted they were wrong and exposed false claims about weapons of mass destruction. Millions of people marched in the streets and to some extent, found that at least some of their concerns were reflected in the media they consumed.

The response to Gaza has felt different. As the death toll has climbed and public opinion has shifted, much of the political and media class has remained remarkably resistant to changing course. The result is a growing sense that the argument taking place among ordinary people is not the same argument taking place inside Westminster, Washington, or many of the institutions meant to hold power to account.

But it’s important to understand that the tools now being deployed against pro-Palestine activism were not built overnight, and long before Gaza, the line between protest and extremism was already being blurred. The legal architecture was built years earlier, as governments responded to disruptive climate protests by granting police broader powers through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Act. Rights groups like Human Rights Watch have warned that these measures have resulted in arbitrary restrictions, arrests and prosecutions of peaceful protesters. In 2019, counter-terrorism police included Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent climate movement, in anti-extremism guidance alongside National Action, a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group. More recently, organisers from the climate campaign group Just Stop Oil have received prison sentences of up to five years for non-violent direct action. Once those powers and precedents were established, it was only a matter of who would be targeted next, culminating in the government’s proscription of Palestine Action.

For decades, Western governments could support Israel while claiming to represent liberal values because the contradiction was hidden behind language of “peace process, self-defence, shared democracy.” Gaza has shattered that language. The public has seen hospitals bombed, children starved, aid blocked, journalists killed, families erased, and Western governments continue to arm, defend and excuse the state responsible.

That is why Palestine is the litmus test. Not because Western democracy was ever as free or principled as it claimed, but because Gaza has stripped away the pretence. Millions have marched, organised, spoken out and demanded an end to mass slaughter. Yet governments have largely ignored them, while critics have faced censorship, surveillance, arrests and smears.

What makes this decision so significant is not simply that two pro-Palestine voices were barred from entering Britain. It is who those voices are. Uygur is one of the most prominent left-wing political commentators in the United States, with an audience of millions and a decades-long presence in mainstream political debate. If someone of that profile can be excluded for his views on Israel, the bar has moved. What was once presented as an exceptional power reserved for extremists is now being applied to figures operating squarely within democratic political discourse.

The lesson, then, is not that Britain is suddenly becoming authoritarian. The lesson is harsher: the machinery was already there, waiting for the right cause to justify its use. Palestine has exposed where the boundaries of permissible speech really lie, which freedoms are real, which are conditional, and how quickly they can disappear when they challenge power

.

And yet the rhetoric has not changed. Stability. Security. Preventing a greater threat. The underlying assumption beneath all of it, the one that never gets named directly is that American military force can contain the violence it unleashes.

That assumption has shaped American foreign policy for decades. The results are not ambiguous.

Vietnam was framed as a fight for freedom against communism. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson told Americans that “the independence of South Vietnam” was essential to the security of the free world. More than 58,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese civilians would eventually die in a war that the Pentagon Papers later revealed successive administrations privately knew was failing.

The same logic returned after 9/11. Bush declared that “freedom and fear are at war” and warned the world that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” That framing transformed a horrific attack into an open-ended global war with almost no geographic or legal limits. Afghanistan became the first battlefield. Twenty years later, after more than 170,000 deaths and nearly $2.3 trillion spent, the Taliban returned to power within days of the American withdrawal. The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post, later exposed how deeply U.S. officials had misled the public throughout. One senior official admitted: “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served under both Bush and Obama, confessed: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.”

Yet the war continued for two decades.

For many who lived through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the current confrontation with Iran carries haunting echoes of that era. On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and that “the United States and our allies have prevailed.” In reality, the war had barely begun. The nearly decade-long occupation that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilized an entire region. The Iraqi state collapsed, unleashing sectarian violence that tore through the country for years. The abuses at Abu Ghraib became a global symbol of torture and impunity. The chaos and power vacuum helped give rise to ISIS. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates the post-9/11 wars would ultimately cost the United States roughly $8 trillion.

Before the first bombs fell, millions of people had marched against the war in what was then described as the largest coordinated anti-war protest in human history. UN weapons inspectors repeatedly said they had found no evidence that Iraq possessed active weapons of mass destruction. Mohamed ElBaradei, then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, publicly challenged claims that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons. Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix warned that inspections were still ongoing and that war was not justified.

They were ignored anyway.

Libya followed a similar trajectory. In March 2011, Barack Obama justified military intervention by warning that forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were advancing on Benghazi, where a massacre of civilians could “stain the conscience of the world.” Gaddafi was overthrown within months. Libya soon descended into militia warfare, political fragmentation, arms trafficking and competing foreign interventions. Obama would later describe the failure to plan for the aftermath as the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

The point is not that every war is identical. It is that American power keeps relying on the same underlying belief: that the United States has the right to reshape other societies through force while imagining itself somehow insulated from the consequences. Scholars often describe this as American hubris, but stripped of the academic language, it is really the conviction that American power is uniquely moral, uniquely necessary and therefore exempt from the rules applied to everyone else.

But I want to be precise about what this pattern proves and what it does not — because the argument matters, and it is worth making carefully.

The empirical case is damning and clear: American military interventions have, with striking consistency, produced consequences far worse than their architects predicted. That case stands on its own. It does not need to be inflated into a stronger claim to land with force.

The stronger claim, that American militarism is a self-perpetuating machine that produces wars by design, is harder to sustain. It is true that even wars widely regarded as failures still expand defence budgets, enrich arms manufacturers, deepen military alliances and reinforce America’s role as the central security actor in the international system. Those structural incentives are real and they matter. But wars also happen because of genuine strategic miscalculation, bureaucratic momentum, domestic political pressure, and sometimes real security dilemmas that do not have clean solutions. The Taliban really did harbor Al-Qaeda. The weapons of mass destruction assessments were not purely invented they reflected intelligence failures and institutions that could not pressure-test their own assumptions. These were failures of judgment and process as much as failures of interest. Treating them as one unified machine flattens what actually needs to be understood.

This distinction is not academic. If the system produces wars mechanically by design, the only solution is to dismantle the entire machine a project so vast it becomes impossible to connect to specific political action. If wars also emerge from miscalculation, institutional failure and compressed decision-making under pressure, then there are concrete levers: stronger constraints on executive war powers, more independent oversight of the intelligence claims used to justify force, more robust international authorization requirements. The argument for those things is stronger, not weaker, when it rests on what is actually demonstrated.

I grew up in Rwanda during the height of the War on Terror, and long before I understood geopolitics, I understood America as the center of the world. It was in the television we watched, the universities everyone was encouraged to admire, the aid infrastructure embedded across African countries, and the entertainment industry that exported American power as common sense. Shows like Homeland framed CIA operations, drone wars and counterterrorism through the lens of morally burdened Americans trying to protect civilization from chaos. Films like Zero Dark Thirty turned torture and the hunt for Osama bin Laden into stories about American trauma and heroism. Even when American wars went catastrophically wrong, American culture still positioned the United States as the main character of the story.

But people in the Global South experience these wars differently, because we live with the consequences long after American attention moves on.

The World Bank warned earlier this year that a wider regional conflict involving Iran could sharply increase fuel, fertilizer and food prices globally, with import-dependent countries likely to be among the hardest hit. That means a war discussed in Washington through the language of “deterrence” or “regional stability” can translate into rising transport costs in Kigali, higher food prices in Nairobi and worsening debt pressures across countries already struggling with inflation, climate shocks and IMF austerity programs.

Vietnam did not stop Iraq. Iraq did not stop Libya. Libya did not stop Iran.

Each intervention was introduced as historically unique. Each one was framed as an unfortunate necessity. Each one arrived wrapped in the language of freedom, security, civilization or humanitarianism. And each time, the people paying the highest price were the ones with the least power over the decisions being made.

That pattern does not require a conspiracy to explain it. It requires only that powerful institutions, operating under political pressure, with genuine but systematically distorted beliefs about what their power can achieve, keep making the same kind of mistake. Understanding why, clearly, specifically, is the only way to argue seriously for stopping it

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