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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to this week’s episode.

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

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

Watch the episode, and tell me what you think.

Warm regards,

Dr Myriam François

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.

Read more

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

.