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Money in politics now ranks as the number one national problem for American voters across the spectrum, according to polls, with the US public increasingly feeling as if it has been stripped of its political agency by wealthy donors.

Though Donald Trump will in all likelihood face an unprecedented backlash in November’s midterms, even voters turning out for the Democrats say they don’t trust the opposition to take on the ‘pay to play’ political system.

Crypto and AI have been channelling unprecedented sums – more than $520 million – into a vast political influence campaign striving to buy industry allies in both parties this midterm cycle.

These are not popular industries.

Crypto is increasingly linked to fraud. Meanwhile, the AI industry is non-consensually encasing the nation in resource-guzzling data centres, while issuing alarming apocalyptic threats about people’s livelihoods and futures.

A recent paper by the Institute for New Economic Thinking warns that if the Democratic Party wins Congressional power and regresses to the status quo of corporate patronage rather than addressing economic precarity and inequality, there could be yet another – possibly even more extreme – right-wing populist backlash.

“Most ordinary people are really unhappy, really frightened, and really squeezed, especially on healthcare – and if you’re trying to access higher education, good luck to you,” says Thomas Ferguson, the Institute’s research director and one of the paper’s authors.

“The Democratic Party is essentially a split-level show at the moment,” he explains – contrasting the affordability and “labour-oriented” grassroots wing characterised by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani; and the influential ‘old guard’ Democrats who he says have strong, longstanding ties to corporate America and Silicon Valley in particular.

Tech largely ‘went red’ in the early 2020s, but it’s now “taking on many hues”.

“A block of the industry is going blue again,” Ferguson believes – as parts of Silicon Valley, in essence, are finding willing partners in a certain faction of the Democratic Party.

Crypto and AI’s spending push at the midterms has filtered through opaque unlimited funding vehicles known as Political Action Committees (PACs).

Where crypto’s spending has skewed towards Republicans (62-38%); AI spending has focused more on Democrats (61-39%).

The playbook – pioneered by crypto – is centred around rewarding industry allies and brutally punishing candidates that stand in the way of the industry’s preferred regulatory landscape.

The FairShake crypto PAC network spent $40 million to help defeat outspoken crypto skeptic and Democrat Sherrod Brown in 2024 – and has dropped at least another $30 million this cycle to fight his return to Congress.

It serves as a disciplining mechanism for any candidate in either party thinking of standing against the industry.

“You could say that crypto bought a powerful position within the Democratic Party,” Thomas Ferguson says. In 2025, 18 Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to help Trump pass the GENIUS Act, an agreeable regulatory package for Stablecoins (such as Tether). Almost all 18 of them benefited from multi-million-dollar interventions by crypto SuperPACs such as FairShake.

Now, Big AI is following the same strategy.

Leading the Future (LTF), a key pro-AI PAC network which has taken cash from OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, is explicitly modelled on FairShake.

The pair share donors – notably the previously Trump-aligned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz – as well as personnel. Josh Vlasto (former press secretary to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) holds leadership roles in both networks.

There is also the Public First Action PAC network, which has taken more than $40 million from OpenAI rivals Anthropic, the creator of Claude. The group purports to advocate for stricter AI regulation than its rivals at LTF. But critics, such as software engineer and tech journalist Molly White, argue that it is “self-serving lobbying framed as principled advocacy” – an effort to “shape regulations that will benefit their businesses at the expense of everyone else”.

Both big money networks fund ads that have nothing to do with their donors’ products.

In one extreme case, Leading the Future paid for ads against Democratic New York House candidate Alex Bores criticising him for his past work at Palantir – despite the fact that LTF itself is partly funded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

Politico revealed that Democratic consultants have urged candidates in competitive seats to stay quiet on AI for fear of being targeted by the PACs.

Frenzy and Safety

What distinguishes AI is that the industry is embroiled in an insular feud between ‘effective accelerationists’ and ‘effective altruists’.

The debate between offshoots of esoteric Silicon Valley ideology, both sides entrenched in science-fiction and pseudoscience, is elaborate and longstanding. But it went mainstream with the recent resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon.

Dubbed a ‘whistleblower’ by the bulk of the mainstream press, Coxon warned that the industry was “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.

Unlike most traditional whistleblowers, Coxon provided no leaked evidence or receipts. But his intervention has helped fuel panic about a Terminator-style apocalypse which has in turn led many to call for a regulatory response.

Where Trump has sided with the ‘accelerationists’ who believe that the United States must build super-intelligent AI unfettered by regulation to get there before China, a number of the Democratic Party’s leading lights have taken up the mantle of ‘AI safety’.

Both sides of the debate are backed by factions of the industry itself, and take for granted that current Language Language Models (the flagship software of the generative AI boom) will inevitably improve exponentially.

A Byline Times investigation by Nafeez Ahmed was not able to find publicly available data to support the idea of ‘recursive self-improvement’ – machines building smarter and smarter machines. It found that the far likelier disaster scenario has to do with the company’s absurdly over-leveraged financial situation and inability to turn a profit – facts which Anthropic’s position, disclosed in its recent IPO, have borne out.

But a number of credulous media reports about AI agents (autonomous software programmes) supposedly ‘going rogue’ and hacking into various organisations have fed the frenzy about self-aware AI in recent months.

Anthropic has even started considering whether Claude has “some kind of consciousness or moral status”, and whether its product should be endowed with rights. Critics say this is nonsense.

“It is essential for law-makers and the public to understand that none of the reported incidents actually involved loss of control at any time, or arguably even ‘rogue agents’, or any kind of humanlike agency on the part of AI models,” writes Professor of Computer Science Melanie Mitchell. “The blame lies with the humans who failed at engineering safe testing conditions, and who train AI models using methods that incentivise high persistence, autonomous decision-making, and reward hacking.”

Too Big to Fail, Again

Top Democrats are getting involved in the debate.

Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have publicly backed Project Blueprint – an initiative to get AI executives in the room with the politicians writing the industry’s rules.

It is housed inside Democratic mega-donor Ron Conway’s venture capital firm – Conway has also backed Leading the Future with $100 million – and led by former Obama press secretary and Amazon executive Jay Carney.

House Leader Hakeem Jeffries has launched a new commission designing the Democrats’ AI safety policy “in partnership with the innovation community” – packed with representatives who have benefited from the industry’s PAC spending at this election.

“A past Democratic elite with a highly questionable record on financial reform is now re-emerging on the scene with the support of many – if not all – of the tech industry,” Thomas Ferguson says. “They’re offering a weak, inadequate, industry-friendly regulatory settlement as the responsible alternative to Trump’s near-total deregulation.”

Ferguson worries that the Democrats’ regulatory plans could entrench rather than constrain the AI giants: protecting them from liability, limiting competition through rules around cheaper open-source models and licensing, and handing oversight to national security institutions with a “veil of secrecy” that would make meaningful public scrutiny difficult.

Invoking former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Ferguson also emphasises that there are already existing consumer protection laws that could be enforced to hold AI companies accountable for the damage they have caused.

Perhaps most concerning to Ferguson – and a rising chorus of others – is about what happens when the AI boom turns bust.

Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued that the US Government should serve as the industry’s “insurer of last resort” – prompting familiar concerns that Big AI will be deemed ‘too big to fail’.

Ferguson puts it bluntly: “It appears that the same Democrats who coddled the banks after 2008 are now offering to turn the same trick for tech. Their big weapon, as always, is money.”

Yet, there are real alternatives on offer in the party.

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants major AI firms brought under democratic control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for protecting consumers and workers from a possible AI-induced economic collapse.

The Great Recession, and the Obama administration’s role in bailing out Wall Street, is often credited with incubating the discontent behind right-wing populism. Ferguson warns that, if both parties patronise Silicon Valley and fail to curb its excesses, history has a real risk of repeating itself. ●

This article appears in the current print and digital edition of the Byline Times monthly magazine.

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Khaled’s life has always revolved around the olive farming in his field in Battir, a town near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. But in October, just as the harvest season was getting underway, he had to pay 100 shekels (£24) for a bottle of olive oil. “Every year I produce four tins, which are enough for my home, but this year there is nothing at all. I can’t reach the olive trees I need to harvest,” he explained in Hebrew.

The barriers keeping farmers like Khaled from their land are rooted across the Green Line, where the politics of settlement expansion have become central to Israeli governance.

Preliminary tallies from Israel’s parliamentary election left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc short of a majority at 53 Knesset seats. An opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot captured 48, while Arab-led factions surged to 19, pointing toward another protracted stalemate.

Efforts to unseat Netanyahu quickly stalled: Eisenkot ruled out relying on Arab factions, even as Yousef Jabareen, head of the 12-seat Joint List, insisted on X that genuine change requires “Jewish-Arab partnership.”

Facing deadlock and record Arab turnout, Netanyahu’s Likud escalated, alleging the election was “stolen by Arab parties” through fraud and voter intimidation and demanding police and Shin Bet investigations.

The campaign broadsides mirrored a governing formula honed over years. Dependent on far-right partners to stay in office, Netanyahu has steadily empowered the ultranationalist settler movement by legalising rogue outposts or distributing assault rifles to West Bank civilian security squads.

On the ground, that political impunity has fuelled an unprecedented wave of violence. Since October 2023, more than 1,100 Palestinians across the West Bank have been killed, according to United Nations monitors.

During the harvest alone, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din documented 486 incidents of violence by settlers and soldiers over an 18-day stretch, including 234 attacks directly targeting olive harvests, with Israeli troops present in 62 of them.

Facing Violence in the Groves

Khaled’s family lands lie alongside the old Jaffa–Jerusalem railway, a few hundred meters from the 1949 Green Line. Resting under the shade of an olive tree, he recounted the repeated settler attacks he has endured.

“They let us spend a whole day picking olives, working hard, me and my family. We gather them, pack them into sacks and then they come with total ease, beat us up, take our olives, and leave”, he said.

Against this backdrop of violence, the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights coordinates volunteers multiple times a week to accompany Palestinian farmers into the groves. They rise at dawn, gathering at designated meeting points in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Wearing a bucket hat and an easy smile, Charline, a 23-year-old French-Israeli, mingled with fellow volunteers while waiting for a minibus whose destination organizers had kept secret until the very last minute.

Like many in the group that morning, this marked the first time she had taken her political convictions into the field to physically support Palestinians facing settler violence. An undercurrent of anxiety was palpable; recent weeks had brought a steady stream of footage showing volunteers pelted with stones, and journalists and politicians beaten by settlers.

“I feel deeply ashamed of what is happening, because this is my country, even if I haven’t lived here for very long, and I refuse to let this be done in my name. I just can’t accept it,” Charline said. “I also can’t accept living comfortably in Tel Aviv, where life goes on as normal, knowing what is unfolding just 20 kilometres away, whether in the occupied territories or in Gaza. Above all, I think it comes down to this: refusing to look away.”

On the bus, a young organiser ran through the safety protocols. If settlers begin throwing stones, he warned, never turn your back and run; keep your eyes on the projectiles to dodge them. If Israeli forces fire stun grenades, plug your ears and open your mouth wide, he instructed, miming the motion.

Rabbis for Human Rights, which was created in 1988 during the First Intifada to address occupation-related human rights abuses, unites Israeli rabbis across diverse Jewish denominations who advocate for universal human rights as a core, faith-driven mandate rooted in Jewish tradition.

“Settler terrorism is really rooted in religious extremism. It is a very worrying fanaticism that claims that God gave the entire land to the Jewish people and you can use whatever means to take this land. It’s kind of a holy war. It’s very, very dangerous,” explained Anton Goodman, CEO of the organisation.

Locked Gates and Closed Roads

Standing in the aisle, the coordinator finally disclosed where they were headed: Bethlehem, biblical birthplace of Jesus and, in Jewish lore, of King David. After an hour on the road, the West Bank’s rolling hills appeared through the bus windows.

Reaching the West Bank was the easy part. Getting to Khaled’s village proved harder. Turned away by a temporary Israeli army checkpoint, the Palestinian driver swung toward the village of Husan, only to find its yellow gate locked. Unfazed, the RHR coordinators called in another bus; volunteers slipped past the barrier on foot and climbed aboard. Such improvisation is routine in a territory where, by April, the U.N. counted 925 physical obstacles, including 307 checkpoints, restricting Palestinian transit.

In Khaled’s grove, around fifty volunteers of all generations climbed trees and picked olives one by one. Noga weaved between them. A hasty departure from New York in late September for family reasons had left the 72-year-old Israeli-American ill-equipped for the terrain; in sandals, she periodically stumbled on the rocky hillside. Still, with the Israeli parliamentary elections merely five days away, boots or not, Noga was resolute: her place was here, beside the Palestinians.

Sitting on a tarp, with olives in one hand while using the other to strip them, she said : “It is heartbreaking to see the extremists in power, filled with fear, and dominating the narrative and the events of the day. There’s no other future but to find a way to live together and discuss differences, and not kill each other”.

In recent weeks, Israel has tightened restrictions on the olive harvest, requiring Palestinians to obtain prior military clearance before accessing their groves. Khaled’s trees, like most of the West Bank’s farmland, lie in Area C, under direct Israeli military rule.The latest directives place roughly 8,800 hectares of agricultural land off-limits, a 30% surge compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, Israeli citizens have seen their access to surrounding lands expanded.

Detained for Helping Palestinians

Khaled and his family were in constant motion, shifting tarps, tipping buckets of olives into oversized sacks while tending to their guests. Coffee simmered over a makeshift fire. Turning down the sweets passed around by the farmers was out of the question - everyone needs their strength. Under a punishing sun, the volunteers worked without pause. The mood was bright; unlike the day before, both the soldiers and the settlers seemed to be occupied elsewhere.

On October 21st, the Israeli military detained about 80 American, Israeli, and British volunteers assisting Palestinian farmers with the olive harvest near Bethlehem. Among them was Rabbi Doug Alpert, who, upon his release, chose to return to the groves the very next day.

According to him, despite complying with an unannounced military closure order and attempting to leave, the volunteers were detained by Israeli soldiers, transferred to a station, and questioned for an hours-long detention.

“They fingerprinted and took mug shots of us. We were led to believe that there was a strong likelihood we were going to get deported”, said American Rabbi Doug Alpert. “I felt the injustice that I know Palestinians go through every day for years and years and years now. And we only experienced it for a day.” He had flown in specifically from Kansas City to stand with farmers facing settler violence.

Around 1 pm, organisers called across the groves for a midday break before departure, but the volunteers lingered among the trees. Charline worked alone, gathering stray olives scattered in the dirt. Nearby, Rabbi Doug Alpert folded a collection tarp alongside fellow Americans, while Noga remained seated under another trunk, methodically sorting fruit from leaves.

As the work wound down, Khaled thanked the volunteers, telling them how grateful he was for their presence. Yet the solidarity offered little relief from the constant friction he described living beside the nearby settlements.

He said : “They come to attack you without letting you say a word. If you’re strong, okay, you manage; if you’re not strong, you’re done for with the clubs that they carry”.

Soon, the group was on the road to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; within days, several of the visitors would be flying back to their home countries, their votes cast.

Khaled remained behind. With white hair and deep lines etched by decades under the sun in his groves, he looked out across the land. “Before October 7th, there was a life,” he said. “Today, there is no life.”

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I voted early in the US midterms because I was going to be out of the country on Election Day itself. Before entering the voting area, I chatted to both Democrat and Republican party representatives standing by, ready to give voters information about the candidates and policy initiatives on the ballot.

Speaking first to the Republican party representatives, I heard such a series of whopping distortions about current political issues, that my jaw literally dropped. It brought home to me just how much the Trump administration’s practice of serial dishonesty has seeped down to the rank and file level, turning even relatively normal Republican party members into willing accomplices, in their desperate attempt to cling onto power.

The person I spoke to was an elegantly dressed, middle-aged woman, who reminded me exactly of the kind of well-spoken, middle-class women who used to run charity events or bake sales for Conservative candidates in the UK Home Counties in the 1970s. After introducing myself to her as a relatively new voter, willing to be persuaded, I asked her to convince me why I should vote for her party.

Instead of talking about national level issues, or the candidates running for office in my district, she immediately opted to talk about three specific constitutional amendment proposals which are also on the ballot in Virginia.

The Amendment Proposals

According to the leaflets provided by the state, the first proposal is aimed at enshrining reproductive rights in the Virginia constitution, including the right to make personal decisions concerning prenatal care, childbirth, birth control, abortion, miscarriage management and fertility care, and to protect doctors, nurses and patients from being punished for their decisions. The proposed language includes provision for the State to be able to regulate abortion care in the third trimester (ie: restrict it), but allows for abortion care in all circumstances when it is medically needed to protect the life and health of the patient, or when the foetus is not viable.

This is against a backdrop of many states introducing more restrictive measures on abortion following the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022 overturning Roe vs Wade, which previously guaranteed reproductive rights at the federal level. Since then, there have been numerous cases of women in states such as Texas being forced to carry unviable pregnancies to term, of being denied medical care during miscarriages, and of medical staff being threatened with prosecution if they provide such medical care.

But according to my Republican lady, the proposal was primarily a backdoor way for allowing abortion without limits, removing parental authority, allowing sterilisation and transgender procedures, and the “unregulated sale and purchase of human embryos leading to the exploitation of women.” When I asked her to show me where in the proposed amendment it said all these things, she said she did not actually have it to hand.

The second ballot initiative proposes to amend the Virginia state constitution to enshrine the right to same sex marriages, and for all legally valid marriages to be treated equally under the law – both of which, astonishingly, are still prohibited in the Virginia state constitution, though protected at a federal level following a ruling by the Supreme Court in 2015. The proponents of the amendment have argued that it is important to enshrine the right at state level as well, in case a future Supreme Court decides to overturn its previous decision, as it did concerning abortion rights.

However, again, according to my Republican lady, and her leaflet, the real agenda was “trans-ideology”, including allowing males in female sports and spaces. Again, she was unable to show me the precise language in the amendments making these points.

So, I walked to the Democrat booth, where I was given a leaflet setting out the actual proposed new wording – and sure enough, there was absolutely nothing in them about transgender issues, sale of embryos, or any of the other alleged horrors she described. The proposed amendments were exactly as described in the official summary.

When I returned to the Republican table to show them the language, and ask them to clarify how it chimed with their allegations, they refused to discuss it, saying I obviously had an agenda.

So we never got round to discussing the third amendment, which proposes lifting the current ban in Virginia on convicted felons ever being able to vote again, unless they get a special exemption from the Governor, to allow them to rejoin the democratic process once they have served their time. However, the explanation I read in their handout turned out to be equally specious – arguing in capital letters that the main aim was “expanding rights to MURDERERS, RAPISTS, PEDOPHILES, AND MENTALLY INCOMPETENT” (sic).

Of course, I can understand why many voters might feel queasy about allowing any violent offenders the chance to vote again, but the existing rules virtually eliminate any chance at rehabilitation and atonement – surely the kind of Christian virtues many conservatives embrace.

In practice, it also would not actually apply to the most violent offenders, such as those guilty of aggravated forms of murder, since they receive mandatory life sentences. Moreover, the hypocrisy of the Republican stance on this issue is also off the charts, given the naked grift, criminality, and cover-up of the Epstein files by the Trump administration, and Trump’s pardoning of hundreds of convicted criminals on the flimsiest of reasons.

Questions: Provocative or Pertinent?

I then tried to talk to the Republican lady about her wider reasons for supporting the party. She said she was originally a Democrat, then became an Independent voter, then a Republican, because of the economy. So I asked her if the price of petrol or groceries had gone up or down under Trump. She insisted gas prices were lower than under President Biden. When I later cross-checked her argument, I discovered she was right that gas prices had once briefly been higher under Biden – climbing over $5 in 2022 shortly after the invasion of Ukraine – but had been lower than today’s prices for 95% of his Presidency.

I asked if she supported Hegseth’s proposal to live stream the execution of a criminal on a US military base. She said this had only been a suggestion – even though Hegseth had actually declared it was going to happen, until he was overruled by Trump.

I asked if she thought it appropriate for the President to threaten to invade a NATO partner country in order to take control of Greenland. She said that it was necessary for the US to have Greenland for national security, and that anyway, the US hadn’t ended up attacking Denmark since a deal had been reached. I asked how she would feel if Britain declared it needed Alaska for its national security, or France decided it wanted New Orleans back. Would it be acceptable for them to threaten the US with military action if it refused to hand these territories over? She refused to reply.

I asked if she thought it was appropriate for President Trump to say to a female reporter “Quiet, Piggy”. She said it was misrepresented by the media. I asked how she would feel if I told her “Quiet, Piggy.” Wouldn’t she be offended? I pushed her to agree that the President had actually said those words. She kept saying that the incident was misrepresented, and the media were always unfairly attacking the President.

My last question was if she thought it appropriate that the President had pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists, to which she replied “there was no insurrection.”

I will admit that by the end of our conversation I was going out of my way to ask provocative questions. She and her colleagues became so irritated that they eventually threatened to call the police on me. But by then, I had become so gobsmacked, that I was happy to walk away.

The Damage Done

I came away from the encounter shocked to the core. She came across as a decent person, someone who probably thought of herself as a pillar of society, doing her civic duty by engaging in the political process. Ordinarily, she probably would deplore political violence, or declining standards in public life. Yet, here she was, dismissing the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and wilfully distorting policy issues.

It was a classic example of how the serial dishonesty displayed at the top levels of the Republican party has now seeped down to the ordinary rank and file members. No doubt, Republicans will argue, not entirely without cause, that many Democrats have been guilty of similar distortions – though surely none as serious as denying the gravity of what happened on 6 January.

My Republican lady was obviously an educated woman, who could not genuinely plead ignorance. Either she had decided it was necessary to do whatever it took to stop, in her mind, the appalling prospect of a Democrat administration. Or, she has become so brainwashed by the lies spewed out by her party, that she can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction.

Either way, it’s a worrying example of the degree to which political life has become degraded in America. In the run up to the midterms, many analysts have good reason to worry about the extent to which the Trump administration might try to invalidate the elections, for example, by challenging outcomes in court, claiming illegal voting, seizing ballot boxes or machines, alleging foreign interference etc. But even if most of these efforts fail, more lasting damage to America’s democracy has already been done, in the form of turning too many good citizens into willing liars.

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A Guest Post by Andrew Duncan, co-founder of the RT Weatherman Foundation and producer of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.

I met Joshua Wong in 2014, when he was a teenager. He was no ordinary teenager. He became one of the great student organisers of our time, and I was lucky enough to help tell his story on film. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower premiered at Sundance in 2017 and won the Audience Award. Joshua sat beside me at the premiere. The next day, Netflix signed it.

That film ended in 2016, on something close to a happy ending. The new film – which you can watch via the Byline Times Podcast below – shows what happened next.

I screened it for the first time on 13 October, Joshua’s 30th birthday, in a committee room in the Houses of Parliament. Joshua spent that day in a cell in Hong Kong. He is already serving almost five years for subversion. In September, he appeared in court in Hong Kong in a second national security case, and he is still waiting to be sentenced. He could face life. What did he do? He travelled to Washington, Berlin and London and asked parliaments to help hold Beijing to its word. That is the case against him.

That word was given to Britain. In 1984, London and Beijing signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration and registered it at the United Nations. It promised Hong Kong “one country, two systems” for fifty years, until 2047. In 1997, the then Prince Charles stood in Hong Kong as Britain handed the city over on those terms. That promise has been torn up. In 2020, Beijing imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong. It has used that law, and other charges, against some of the finest people the city has produced: Cardinal Zen, Martin Lee, Benny Tai, Jimmy Lai, and Joshua. Even the original film isn’t safe. After it climbed back to the top of Netflix in Hong Kong this year, the city’s Security Bureau began looking at whether it can be taken down.

The week of the screening of the new film, a senior official in London declined to meet me. The reason given was that this is “not a national security issue.” I find that hard to accept. A young man born in British Hong Kong is in prison for asking China to honour a treaty with Britain. If Beijing can break that agreement without cost, why would it keep any other? Think about trade. Think about the technology in British homes and cars. Think about transnational repression on British streets. A promise broken without cost is an invitation to break the next one.

My team works in Ukraine, bringing home British wounded and British dead from a war kept going with Beijing’s money. Joshua is a rescue we cannot carry out. This one needs Britain. On 2 September, Sir Iain Duncan Smith raised Joshua’s case in the House of Commons. The Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, replied: “I absolutely will take up that case.” Seven weeks on, we don’t know whether he has, or what Beijing said if he did.

I keep hearing that Britain must tread carefully on China’s new embassy in London because of building work on Britain’s embassy in Beijing. In Liverpool last month, I heard Andy Burnham speak about British values, and I believed him. I don’t believe that the Prime Minister would put renovations ahead of a British promise. Britain has leverage, and it should use it. The release of Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong’s other political prisoners should be a condition of the relationship with Beijing: the embassy decision, market access, all of it. Nor is cost an excuse. If they are released, the RT Weatherman Foundation will pay for their travel and resettlement here in full, at no cost to the British taxpayer.

So please watch the film. Then do one thing: write to your MP and ask them to put a single question to the Foreign Secretary. Has Joshua Wong’s name been raised with Beijing, and what was the answer? I made this film as a birthday present for my friend. The best present Britain could give him is to keep its word.

Andrew Duncan is co-founder of the RT Weatherman Foundation and producer of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.

Watch Andrew in conversation with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times podcast, followed by his video update about Joshua Wong here.

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For many of my Boomer generation, the artist, broadcaster, novelist, and critic John Berger was as essential a guide to our postwar 60s consumer society as George Orwell had been to the decline of the British Empire and the rise of fascism for the generation before.

They had many things in common.

Both Orwell and Berger were casualties of the class hierarchies of English culture, especially as inculcated through the cruelties of private boarding schools.

Orwell was schooled at St Cyprian’s and Eton, followed by five years policing Burma.

Abused by one of his teachers, Berger ran away from St Edward’s at 16 and went to art school in London, lodging in the Hampstead attic of the child psychoanalyst DW Winnicott, where the two of them talked at length about how children are made, and unmade.

Both eschewed university.

Conscripted in 1945, Berger refused an officer’s commission and served instead as a lance corporal among working-class recruits. Army life seems to have been too much for him. As Tom Overton reveals in his new biography, John Berger: From Life, Berger appears to have been sectioned out of the army after a psychiatric episode and a stay in Grahamholm Military Hospital, south of Belfast. (By coincidence, my father’s army service ended the same way a few years later.)

Berger then struggled to make a living as an artist, just as Orwell had struggled to make a living as a novelist, and likewise funded his ‘artistic’ activities with gigs in print journalism.

Orwell’s column in the left-wing weekly Tribune, ‘As I Please’, ran from 1943 to 1947. It was a licence to write about whatever caught his eye.

Berger took up almost the same brief in the same paper four years later under the heading ‘Looking Around’, with essays ranging from Stanley Spencer to Le Corbusier, from the painted caves at Lascaux to the Festival of Britain, often quoting Orwell in support of his own arguments.

They both also wrote for the New Statesman, then the in-house journal of the Oxbridge-connected left establishment, and chafed against its attempt to box them in either as cultural commentators or political pundits.

Arguing back against his critics in the letters pages of the weekly, Berger explained: “Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics.”

Writing in Gangrel in 1946, Orwell exclaimed: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past 10 years, is to make political writing into an art.”

A shared background in polemical print journalism explains the sharp angles of attack that make Orwell and Berger’s essays still so immediately readable. But the clarity of their prose probably comes from somewhere else: years writing for the medium of radio.

Orwell spent two years on the BBC’s wartime Eastern Service at 200 Oxford Street, writing talks to be read to India. Seven years after he walked out, Berger crossed the same thick red carpet. His first broadcast went out on the General Overseas Service in the early hours of 10 October 1950: 15 minutes on the current art exhibitions.

Before long, Berger was describing the pictures in the National Gallery to West Africa on a programme called London Calling.

Hours composing for the radio microphone, learning the way it picks up the emphases of everyday speech and the tonal authority of voice, explains why the words of both writers, many years later, still leap off the page.

But here the similarities end, and the differences widen. The 23-year age gap between Orwell and Berger became an abyss – the gulf between pre-war and postwar.

Class and Commodities

Pre-war, Orwell, the upper-class Etonian, was a vertical descender.

Down and Out in Paris and London and later The Road to Wigan Pier were attempts to discover how people lived on the other side of the English class system: washing dishes in Paris, sleeping in lodging houses, descending into mines.

Berger’s postwar world required more lateral thinking. His first-person reportage looked at the stresses and strains of the postwar welfare state.

With the photographer Jean Mohr, he followed a country doctor through the Forest of Dean in A Fortunate Man. His subjects were not the indentured labourers of the British Empire but the migrant workers of a rebuilt Europe.

In A Seventh Man, he tracked the Gastarbeiter from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia as they shuttled across the new ‘Common Market’ to answer the needs of a booming consumer society.

The shift between empire and consumer society was also a change between the language of bureaucracy and the iconography of consumption.

Brought up to administer the Empire, Orwell was primarily of a world organised by class, classification, racial categories, and the ‘white man’s burden’. His focus was on language, and how it reveals not only the ideas we think about, but the ideas we think with.

His appendix to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, is a testament to how political vocabularies can make some thoughts impossible, and the unthinkable possible.

Berger inherited a different world whose centre of gravity shifted towards mass media, migration, the global market, and a new visual order. His postwar Europe was no longer organised only around bourgeois and proletarian, ruler and ruled, but increasingly around consumer and producer.

While his predecessor went looking for the people hidden beneath the class system, Berger went looking for the world hidden behind the commodity.

To do so, Berger left Britain, and then urban life, spending most of his time with one partner in a peasant village in the Haute-Savoie, though regularly visiting the metropolis of Paris (and a second partner) on his motorbike.

Whereas the peasant still experienced the world of production through things made, grown, repaired, slaughtered, stored, and handed down; the metropolitan citizen was bedazzled and enchanted by things bought, advertised, displayed, and consumed.

This was what the French Marxist Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”, and Berger, with his artist’s eye and visual acuity, was perfectly placed not only to see through the spectacle, but also to expose the lenses it imposed on us.

Ways of Seeing Again

Berger’s seminal four-part analysis of our visual culture, Ways of Seeing – its opening episode connecting Renaissance Quattrocento perspective with Soviet Cinema and the writings of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin – is still extraordinary viewing more than half a century later.

He describes how high art has been processed by mechanical reproduction into weaponised information.

The BBC2 series, which first aired in 1972, begins with a surrealist provocation as Berger apparently cuts off the head of Botticelli’s Venus in the National Gallery with a scalpel (it was just a reproduction). Yet, this avant-garde provocation compels less than the arresting intensity of Berger’s eyes and the moral clarity of his voice.

His success as a TV personality did not come out of the blue.

Berger had begun broadcasting in 1958 for the BBC’s Monitor arts programme; and was soon on the commercial stations, ATV, explaining Picasso’s Guernica to Kenneth Clark; and by the early 1960s surviving on arts commissions from Granada TV.

These forays into the new mass medium attracted the disdain of contemporaries such as the novelist Doris Lessing.

For a while, Berger claimed he only took these gigs to fund his fiction writing. But he soon realised it was a new, direct way of talking to people beyond the confines of the literary world. And colour TV gave him a whole new palette to play with.

It worked for me.

As a child of the 60s – who spent hours glued to the blackened chimney stacks and mournful opening music of Coronation Street, or scared by Cybermen coming up through the London sewers in Doctor Who – the advent of colour TV was like a psychedelic trip.

The new station BBC2 was the first to broadcast in colour in 1968. The images I remember are of a luminous test card, and then some endlessly repeated film of a red balloon floating through blue skies.

But it was thanks to another, still living, centenarian – David Attenborough – Controller and then Director of Programmes at BBC2, that Ways of Seeing was ever commissioned and exploded into our living rooms.

Before that, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation was devised to show off the new medium, and fulfil the corporation’s Reithian remit to entertain, educate, and inform. With 13 hours of European cathedrals, paintings, and sculpture, BBC2 proved that television could become an animated museum.

Berger’s follow-up was more like a pot of paint thrown in the face of the audience.

By the second episode, Berger laid bare – in a dazzling montage of images from classical art and modern advertising – the difference between the commodified ‘nude’ and genuine humane nakedness, defining what would later be called the ‘male gaze’.

Ahead of his time, Berger exposed the hypocrisies of the ‘permissive culture’ we had inherited – even if, in his chequered personal life, he seemed to succumb to some of them. The sexual freedom of the 60s, dominated by men, he pointed out, was an opportunity for further intrusion and exploitation.

Feminist writers, such as Susan Griffin in Pornography and Silence (1981), explored further the violence and subjugation that followed, as the male gaze penetrated our most intimate lives.

Berger’s words survive as great prose, even off the screen and on the page. As a student, his writing inspired me more than his TV appearances.

For example, in chapter seven of the book version of Ways of Seeing, explaining the seductive power of advertising, Berger says: “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.”

And then he reframes it again: “One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.”

This is a TV script transforming itself into philosophy and poetry.

It also directly addressed the boom of postwar consumer capitalism I was brought up with, as our desires were targeted, and the promises of romance, exoticism, rebellion, or family security magically connected to the right chocolate box, perfume, car, cereal, or packaged holiday.

Much of the cultural output of the time can be explained by that feeling of post-consumption tristesse.

Jon Voight trailing the New York streets looking for a pick-up in Midnight Cowboy, with Harry Nilsson singing ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ over him. Dustin Hoffman hearing ‘The Sound of Silence’ as he is offered, in The Graduate, a future in the world of “plastics”.

That world of mass media has gone, but the alienation implicit within it has gone deeper.

Thanks to social media, we give our self-knowledge for free in the form of targeting data. Robbed of our self-esteem, assessed and ranked through our Instagram accounts and Facebook posts, we have become the products.

As Berger might have observed, having surrendered our self-knowledge to them for nothing, we have allowed big tech media to know us better than we know ourselves.

Talking to the Dead

Unlike Orwell, who died at 46, Berger lived to 90. With nearly double the lifespan, he could focus on another neglected underclass: the dead.

This preoccupation with mortality, as Tom Overton points out, had been there from the beginning.

When Alberto Giacometti died in January 1966, Berger – then writing for the new weekly New Society – said that the Swiss sculptor’s death confirmed the value of his work, and that his mortality had been “the only perspective he could trust”.

It was as if the profile of the artist, cut out against the frame of the society around them, is only really clarified when death finally defines it.

The same clarification is now happening to Berger himself.

Overton’s biography, compiled during the 15 years since Berger gave his extensive archive to the British Library in 2010, is the first comprehensive account. But there will surely be more to come.

Some might explore Berger’s failings and blind spots in ways he might have preferred hidden.

But the face Berger tried to present – the questioning gaze in Ways of Seeing, demanding you pay attention but also asking you to push back – may matter more.

One of my favourite essays in Berger’s book About Looking focuses on August Sander’s photograph of three young farmers on a road in Westerwald, Germany, in 1914. They wear suits and hats and carry walking sticks.

Berger looked at the suits and saw class: clothing cut for bodies that did not labour, worn by bodies that did, as they marched into the cataclysm of the 20th Century and two world wars.

But there’s something else Berger underplayed. The three men are doing something simpler. They are choosing how to appear.

They have put on their best clothes. They are facing the camera. They are leaving us with a pose. But a pose is not necessarily a lie. It tells us what they wanted to be seen. They are looking to the future with a message.

John Berger’s understanding of what the past was trying to say to us, and how it shapes our present, is perhaps one of the least acknowledged, and most original and radical, legacies of his work. (Remembering that originality means going back to the origins, and radicalism returning to the roots.)

Most progressive left-wing thought has agreed with Karl Marx that the past is a prison to be escaped. “The tradition of all dead generations,” Marx famously declared in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Nearly a century later, Walter Benjamin, who had such an influence on Berger, tried to resurrect a gentler tradition. He saw the dead not as a curse but as an inspiration and an obligation.

Every generation, he wrote in On the Concept of History (1940), is endowed with a weak messianic power, not to bring back an individual saviour, but to redeem the injustices suffered by the dead – a “secret agreement” to redress their historic wrongs.

The fact that Benjamin wrote this months before taking his own life at the Spanish border, rather than risk being sent back into Nazi hands, makes it all the more powerful.

Writing half a century later, John Berger turned this redemptive image around. “The dead surround the living,” he wrote in his Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead in 1994. We think of the dead as departed, a diminishing crowd going away from us. But they are the majority, and we are just the small bright “core” of their collective.

In pure demographic terms, Berger is not wrong.

Despite the explosion in the world’s population in the last 100 years, the dead still outnumber the living by around 15 to one. That ratio will only rise if the world population stabilises, as it is predicted to. And, of course, it would massively increase with any global calamity.

Buried Ways of Being

In Berger’s thesis, he urges us to see the departed not as individuals but collectively.

By focusing on the lost social life of the past, he anticipates the work of modern anthropologists and archaeologists such as David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), who replace the bourgeois histories of great men, kings, and recorded emperors with the growing evidence of different political communities and forms of social organisation, buried ways of being.

In this way, the dead are never really silent, but remain an ever-evolving presence that constantly engages us in dialogue.

The world of the dead, Berger says, is continually “rebegun” in our times. Our present and our future are things that their “imagination” has created.

So Berger inverts Benjamin. We’re not here to save the dead. They are here to save us.

In some small way, John Berger did save me.

Along with the historian Tony Judt, and the newspaper editor Harry Evans, he was the biggest intellectual influence on my life. But unlike with either of them, I never met him in person. Though I nearly did.

To my complete amazement, my publishers sent him a copy of my first book, A Shout in the Street, published in early 1990, which he had done so much to inspire. Berger read it, wrote me a letter praising it as a “dream of a book”, and invited me to visit him in the Alps.

It might have been one of the happiest moments of my life. But it coincided with an even happier and more momentous event. His letter arrived on the same day as my son, Alexander, was born, and I never went to Quincy, in the commune of Mieussy.

Never mind. I can still see him, through the many lenses of our culture and now Tom Overton’s biography, helping to gather in the harvest on those steep alpine slopes, and then roaring back into Paris on his motorbike. ●

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton is published by Allen Lane (Penguin)

Peter Jukes is Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times. This article appears in the current print and digital edition of the Byline Times monthly magazine.

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BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

Hardeep Matharu: What is your background in life and politics, and how did you end up in Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement?

Rich Logis: I come from a quintessential middle-class family. My parents had a variety of public and private sector jobs, and they were highly apolitical. I don’t think my parents ever even voted. I formed some of my political beliefs in college, but spent many years between then and 2015 voting for third-party candidates. In 2015, I was a slightly left-leaning independent. I believed the two parties were the same. I felt very politically lonely. I thought democracy had failed most Americans, and most elected officials cared most about their donors and the wealthy and powerful.

When Trump came on the scene, I was not immediately enamoured with his campaign. But over the course of many months, I found myself nodding in agreement with some of his points about economics, jobs going overseas, once vibrant communities being hollowed-out; his rhetoric about the structural flaws within our political system. Even though he was from the world of wealth and influence and ran as a Republican, I was very enticed by his outsider status.

As time went on, I became more and more in agreement with what he was saying – so much so that, in early 2016, I decided to work on the campaign and became a volunteer doing grassroots work. I wrote part of the call script for the Trump campaign. I showed people where to get registered to vote. Where to vote. I recruited people to vote for Trump, including Bernie Sanders voters. I started to develop relationships with other Trump voters. In 2016, that victory was vindicating for me. I felt like we had taken on the entire world.

I got deeper and deeper into the MAGA community and wound up professionally producing a podcast using my own money (that could have gone to my family or to my business) to meet my goal of being an aspiring MAGA pundit. I was writing freelance articles for Fox, The Federalist, RealClearPolitics, and WorldNetDaily which popularised the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy theory. I spoke at, donated to, and sponsored Trump groups. I worked again on, and was a donor to, the 2020 campaign. I was very public and unapologetic about my support.

HM: When did your thinking and support begin to shift?

RL: The cracks started to ever so slightly form in the summer of 2021. The Covid Delta surge was ravaging the country. Kids were dying. I have two small children myself. My Governor in Florida, Ron DeSantis, platformed Covid anti-vaxxers at one of his press conferences – and it really shocked and confused me, because he had been a proponent of the vaccine up until that point. So I decided to do something that sounds very simple but was profoundly life-altering for me: I diversified my news and information sources. As I started to step outside of the MAGA media bubble, I started to gradually realise that so much of what I believed turned out to be false. I spent a lot of nights in solitude with my thoughts going through this year-long personally tumultuous time, where I had to examine so much of what had been sincerely held beliefs that were false.

I published my memoir earlier this year, One Betrayal Too Many: Why I Left MAGA, and in it I talk about my year of heaven and hell – this year of reckoning in having to come to terms with the fact I had allowed myself to believe lies, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories. I also wrote about a ‘they’ – a ‘they’ who were mostly Democrats; but a ‘they’ who were trying to abridge my rights and trying to indoctrinate my children; a ‘they’ who were coming for my guns, trying to turn America into a communist country; a ‘they’ who were trying to replace white people with brown people and foreigners; a ‘they’ who were trying to persecute Christians.

For me, the final straw was 24 May 2022, the day of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting. Even though Trump was not in office, I knew exactly how he and the GOP were going to respond – and they did: by calling for more guns and more access to guns. That was the day I quietly left MAGA. There was something that had been gnawing at me for doing it privately, because I had always been so unapologetically public in my support for Trump. So on 30 August 2022, I wrote a mea culpa saying sorry to anyone I may have hurt with my words, deeds, and rhetoric and that I wanted to renounce my prior support for Trump and MAGA.

I didn’t think anybody would care. I figured there would be a few comments here and there, and I would close that chapter of my life and move on. But it turned out people did care. I received one comment after another from people very desperately looking to pull their loved ones and friends out of MAGA. I had to acknowledge that I had helped the President divide the country; that I was complicit and culpable in assisting the President in amplifying conspiracy theories that had resulted in unnecessary deaths, suffering, and trauma. And I was naive and unoblivious to the fact millions of relationships had been torn asunder by this movement.

So then came my organisation Leaving MAGA – a new community for people who leave, for people who have doubts about their support for Trump and MAGA, as well as for friends and family for those still in the thrall of MAGA. We are creating, and continuing to build, a pathway for people to leave behind MAGA extremism, and we feel the best way to show someone that exit ramp is by introducing them to others who have also left. Our community has nearly three dozen members and are all individuals who, like me, were very deep in MAGA and then had their own epiphany. As I like to paraphrase the late venerable American writer Ernest Hemingway, the epiphanies happened gradually and then suddenly all at once. The support for MAGA no longer comported with our values. Which led to us making the liberating but painful decision to walk away from something that had shaped our identity.

HM: MAGA has always been a movement that has gone beyond politics, engaging people’s visceral emotional and psychological feelings about themselves and the world. Did you experience this or was it simply Trump’s political positioning that captured you?

RL: The best way of describing MAGA is as a community. It’s where people find gathering in a sense of belonging and camaraderie. It’s where people feel seen and heard. In my case, as a writer and a podcaster, when I would go to my Trump events, people would tell me ‘hey, Rich, I listened to your newest podcast episode, I read your latest article’ – I was appreciated and respected, and that was really intoxicating. Because I had a second family and, as embarrassed as I now am to admit this, it took precedence over my own blood family – I neglected at times my duties as a husband, a parent, and a business owner.

What MAGA represented for me really transcended politics and ideology, but there was a political aspect to it. I believed we were embroiled in an existential battle between good and evil and I was on the right side of history as a real American and everyone who was against us were fake Americans and hostile enemies. I realised after leaving MAGA I had allowed myself to fall prey to a multi-decade coordinated effort to dehumanise and vilify Democrats, progressives, and leftists etc – and this propaganda and agitprop has been effective, consistent, and disciplined. After the 2016 election, I lived on Breitbart and in its comments section.

For all of the mythology of ‘rugged individualism’ within MAGA, it’s comprised of human beings which means it is a very emotional and conformist community. But I don’t have any self-defence for my ignorance and my choices. I have agency. Everyone in MAGA has agency. No one coaxed or coerced me into supporting Trump. But it’s also true all of us are susceptible to being influenced – and I very quickly believed that, if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had won in 2016, they were going to seize power politically indefinitely. It sounds delusional because we know that’s not the case, but it’s what I came to believe and I was around others who also felt that way.

Trump was very persuasive. It was very clear both parties viewed him as a threat. For some, that was a disqualifier. For me, that was an enticement because, when I realised both parties viewed him as a threat, I thought ‘this is the guy needed for this job right now’. I was very seduced by the idea of tearing the entire system down and starting anew because the only way to save democracy was to obliterate the established political order. I was wrong to think that.

HM: Did you feel democracy had personally failed you?

RL: I was not someone who was economically struggling in 2015-16, but I thought the two parties cared more about representing their donors and the wealthy and the powerful. I think it’s a relatively anodyne reason people have for supporting Trump as a candidate. I don’t think that’s applicable any longer, but for people who felt democracy and capitalism had failed them, Trump gave voice to that and highlighted the flaws within our political system. As someone without any government, military, or political experience, he was able to speak about some of these issues from some position of authority because he didn’t come from that world. Yes, he had wealth and influence, but he wasn’t someone who had made economic decisions that had hollowed-out once vibrant communities.

MAGA became a movement based on someone who was leading it. At Leaving MAGA, we don’t refer to it as a ‘cult’ – we don’t think it’s an accurate description. It takes away people’s agency to say that. It also does more harm than good because we want to extract people from MAGA, and calling them cultists makes them dig their heels in deeper when we want to show them the pathway out. When you leave MAGA, you reclaim your agency, individuality, and empathy.

HM: As you said, you have your own family and business. So what was so special about the community, and sense of identity and belonging, that MAGA provided?

RL: I felt like I was this patriotic political soldier and the President was the general. We had a rule that, even if you disagreed with the President on something, you never spoke out publicly because that meant you were engaging in the same type of behaviour as Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. I actually viewed the 2016 Election as a second founding of America, and I felt I was part of something historic.

MAGA shaped my identity, worldview, being, and personhood. The prospect of walking away from that second family and community, and those tight-knit relationships, is terrifying. We would go to holiday parties and invite each other to birthday parties. It was exhilarating and enthralling, and novel and exciting. Leaving is also terrifying because you have to question something that has been so integral to one’s life.

I knew the President had mismanaged the pandemic. I didn’t support what happened on January 6, but I thought initially it had been hyperbolised into a bigger deal than it was. I also didn’t believe the 2020 Election had been stolen and I vehemently disagreed with the President because I knew he was being dishonest, and Trump voters did not deserve to have their intelligence insulted like that. But as the issue of Ron DeSantis happened, I started to better understand January 6 and the conspiracies that fuelled it; then Uvalde – these moments helped me get over my own cognitive dissonance where I had a set of sincerely held beliefs but what my eyes were showing me were conflicting with those beliefs.

HM: The Covid Delta surge, and DeSantis’ platforming of anti-vaxxers, was during a pandemic in which Donald Trump had already suggested to the American public that injecting disinfectants such as bleach might be a way to treat the Coronavirus. Do you think that it’s in these life and death moments when the dangerousness of such political movements is truly exposed?

RL: There’s no doubt being a parent of small children influenced my eventual decision to leave. With the Covid Delta surge resulting in children dying from the virus; Uvalde where the majority of victims were children – I had to accept a very uncomfortable truth which was the Republican Party and Trump deemed acceptable avoidable death, suffering, and trauma.

There was also a defence of politically motivated violence. In February 2022, the Republican Party deemed January 6 to be legitimate political discourse and helped amplify the conspiracy theories that Antifa, Democrats, and leftists were the ones who actually stormed the Capitol. When I started to diversify my news sources, I realised groups like QAnon, which I thought were fringe and operating in the dark bowels of the internet and had no influence at all, did have influence – and the President had given credibility to these conspiracies. I looked at groups like the Proud Boys as hangers-on with no influence, but it turned out they had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world.

HM: Would you say that turning your back on the movement took bravery, considering there will be many who will never ever forgive anyone who was ever involved in MAGA? Or was it more about critical thinking and realisation, and then come what may?

RL: MAGA was another limb attached to my body. To walk away, I had to sever that limb. I never thought of myself as this intrepid person. I feel I need to continue to do this work to continue making amends for some of the damage I caused as a participant.

I think most people in MAGA, deep down, are actually good people. I don’t defend the ignorance, but I think they have been led astray and had their natural fears exploited and manipulated. That’s something Trump, the GOP, the MAGA media and influencers have done very, very well – and that division has distracted us from the fact that, as Americans, I believe we actually agree much more than we disagree. We want economic opportunity, good schools for our kids, high-quality healthcare, a safe and secure country. We might disagree on how to reach those outcomes, but there’s more concurrence than there is a difference in opinion. I don’t think most people in MAGA are extremists, but the contradiction is that MAGA is an extremist group because it encourages its adherents to dehumanise those with whom they disagree – that we have to crush our opponent before they crush us.

To go through the process of self-examination, it’s really hard. But at Leaving MAGA, we’re trying to normalise changing one’s mind – that admitting we made a mistake is not a weakness, it’s a show of strength and maturation. When I left MAGA, I became what I call a born-again human being, where I rediscovered my empathy. Leaving was good for my soul, psyche, and mental health. It makes someone a more sympathetic and empathetic person. It’s why I think the best way of approaching people in MAGA is with empathy, because they have succumbed to mis- and disinformation campaigns.

We are in the United States of Algorithms. Once it’s in the feed, and those one or two videos are viewed, that’s then all people are getting. When I was in MAGA, I was addicted to fear and rage. I was always angry even though I was on the winning side, and I was always afraid of some group or somebody – I always thought there was some devilish liberal behind every tree. MAGA media fuels a lot of the addiction. No one watches Fox News to edify, inform, or educate oneself, but because it reinforces and affirms the addictions to rage and fear. If you watch it for just five or 10 minutes, you’ll feel like there’s a communist takeover of America.

We have a support group every week for friends and family of those in MAGA and something we often speak about is relieving attendees of the pressure of feeling like they can change their MAGA close friend or loved one – because no one can change another person; the change can only come from within the individual. So our support group focuses on self-care, how to set boundaries, and how to keep ourselves mentally grounded as we continue to love and cherish our MAGA close friends and loved ones who have succumbed to extremism and mis- and disinformation.

HM: We don’t live in a wider culture that encourages people to think critically, more deeply, or to be self-examining and change their minds: to be human. At the same time, as you say, the MAGA movement is in itself very dehumanising – built on far-right, white supremacist ideas around racial hierarchy and ‘invasion’, which its members presumably believe and disseminate. How can both be kept in mind when trying to help those wanting to leave?

RL: We want people to feel like Leaving MAGA is a place where they are recognised and are seen and heard. You have to counter the toxicity of the MAGA community with something that is based more on justice, fairness, and love. But it is not enough to just distance oneself from the President. Someone has to also renounce the lies, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories of MAGA politics because the renunciation is how someone starts to make amends. And have to commit to building democracy up rather than tearing it down – by making the continued case that we, as Americans, agree more than we disagree.

In Leaving MAGA, we have a very diverse assortment of people who have left. We have black, white, and Hispanic people. Men and women. Gay and straight. One lady came to MAGA through her Christian nationalist church. Another member was at January 6 and went to prison – he rejected Trump’s pardon. We have a black American who was so desperate for community and to be welcomed, he wore a Confederate flag wristband so he could fit in. We are debasing our own integrity [when we do such things] because we are letting ourselves become someone who, deep down, we really aren’t. But we believe we are doing it for the right reasons. Who doesn’t want to Make America Great Again?

And the problem always is the ‘Again’ part. As a country, our progress has not been linear, it’s ebbed and flowed. Unfortunately, a part of MAGA is about going in reverse. But I would tell those who, to their credit, have never been MAGA, that we can either reject or welcome those who leave. We have to ask ourselves: what is achieved by shunning those who leave? It might feel good in the moment, but, if we are going to talk about saving democracy and building a big tent, that requires welcoming people who are maybe unlikely allies. I’m not a historian, but something I know about American history is that every time we have been in a crisis situation, the way we’ve moved forward is by forming unlikely but necessary alliances. So if someone who is in MAGA having doubts feels like they’re going to be ostracised or shamed, that makes it less likely for them to leave.

I am of the belief there are more people than ever who have quietly left MAGA and are privately harbouring doubts, questioning their belief system, and there’s cognitive dissonance and they’re feeling confused and don’t know what to do. We are a place they can come to safely, freely, and without judgment and fear of recrimination.

HM: How would you describe yourself politically now? Where do you think America is at on its 250th anniversary, given the damage done by a second Trump presidency not just domestically but around the world?

RL: I am a registered independent and don’t belong to any political party. In 2024, I did work on Kamala Harris’ campaign as a co-chair of a committee in Florida doing some outreach and media. I intend to vote Democratic this November. I keep my registration as independent because I feel it brings a bit more credibility given that Leaving MAGA is a non-profit and I want to keep some arm’s length distance from the political parties.

America right now is suffering from a crisis level of mis- and disinformation. Something we are looking to do at Leaving MAGA is to create media literacy programmes because it’s so sorely lacking. How to tell between something that is real and something that’s fake is only going to be exacerbated with AI.

It is true that we are divided and polarised, but I don’t think this is the most divided we’ve ever been. It’s why I do have faith that the American people are going to confront it. I think more and more apolitical Americans are starting to pay attention and, as a result of that, even though I am loth to prognosticate, I think there is going to be an electoral revolt against MAGA in November. Apathy does more harm than good, and we have to encourage participation in our democracy because, even though people might say they don’t care about politics, politics cares about them. In 2024, there were nearly 90 million voting age Americans who didn’t vote. I understand they might feel like their vote doesn’t count or politicians don’t listen to them, but what’s the outcome of not voting? What the Trump administration is doing. So I think we are going to have a recalibration in November and, if Democrats became the majority party, they’re going to have to do the hard work of governing and keeping the promises they are making to get elected.

I have to remain optimistic, especially with those who are in MAGA. I know people can change. We are living proof it’s possible. If we can destigmatise the changing of one’s mind, we can create more harmony between those who were never MAGA and those who left. Because the alternative is to remain in this intense polarisation which only helps those who seek to divide us.

HM: What is the biggest thing you’ve learned as a result of your MAGA journey?

RL: What I came to understand about myself, and about people who leave, and just the overall process about changing one’s mind, is that we are all individuals who control our destiny. I was able to break free from the manacles of a movement which took away my individuality. I understood that it’s possible to be individuals and still be part of a community, and just how necessary community is. It’s not something we want, it’s something we need. I didn’t realise before MAGA just how important community is to us. It’s why with our organisation, we are going to continue to make people feel like this is a community they can be proud of. ●

Visit leavingmaga.org to read testimonials and for more information

Hardeep Matharu is Editor in Chief of Byline Times. This article appears in the current print and digital edition of the Byline Times monthly magazine.

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Donald Trump’s opponents shouldn’t celebrate too quickly even if, as expected, his Republican Party is routed at next week’s US midterm elections. Former UK diplomat Alex Hall Hall has told the Byline Times Podcast the US President is likely to react to defeat by sowing chaos domestically and becoming even more extreme in his foreign policy.

Opinion polls show that Trump’s personal ratings are tanking, and there’s a distinct possibility the Democrats will take control of both sides of Congress – the House Of Representatives and the Senate. Hall Hall said that in this scenario, “I genuinely worry that the administration will try and disrupt the swearing in of the new Congress. If the elections go against them, I think there will be lawsuits, there will be challenges, there will be attempts to claim there was foreign interference, or non-citizens voting, or faulty voting machines. And even if they don’t win all of those challenges, it could cause, particularly in close races, enough chaos and disruption and enough snarling in court cases, that by January 3, when the new Congress is supposed to be sworn in, it might provide an opportunity for the Trump administration to postpone it or disavow the elections, or declare a state of emergency. That is something I’m genuinely worried about.”

It’s not as though Trump doesn’t have form in this regard. He famously refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election which swept Joe Biden into the White House; an episode which culminated in the January 6 riots, when thousands of protestors stormed the Capitol in hope of overturning the result. In a cynical attempt to woo disillusioned voters and reduce energy prices this time around, Trump recently lifted sanctions on Russian diesel imports, but Hall Hall says that voters can see through this “naked ploy”.

“The implication,'“ she said, “was that it was Ukraine's attacks on Russian oil that were partly to blame for their rising prices, rather than – as everybody knows, including most Americans – the war he started in the Middle East against Iran. It's a hopeless deal because the amount of diesel oil he will buy from Russia, according to one estimate, will provide enough fuel for 20 hours in the US of diesel energy. It's a drop in the ocean, and by far the more serious restriction on oil supply is because of the situation with Iran and the Straits of Hormuz and the Houthis. So it is a very transparent ploy. But I don't think it's going to work. I don't think Americans are fooled. I think most Americans understand that the prices at the pump are affected by Iran, not by Ukraine, and most Americans disapprove of the dealings with Russia over this. But in the process, he's selling Ukraine down the river.”

Assuming the Republicans do lose control of Congress, Trump will be left as a lame duck President as far as domestic politics are concerned. Hall Hall fears that, as a result, he’ll become more belligerent on the international stage. “Every President does this in their last two years”, she observed. “If they've lost control of the domestic agenda because they've lost control of Congress, they switch their attention even more to foreign policy because, as Commander-in-Chief, Congress has almost no control over what they do. I think Trump will become even more dangerous. He can sow chaos. He can sow disruption. So I think, sadly, even if the Republicans get defeated in the midterms, I think it's going to lead to Trump being even more erratic, even more dangerous – leaving the Democrats still floundering about how to handle it.”

Watch Alex Hall Hall with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times Podcast here.

The youngest House of Lords peer, Baroness (Carmen) Smith of Llanfaes, is proposing a new bill to overhaul the second chamber – and abolish her own role – this Friday. It’s already ruffling feathers among the ermine-robed masses.

She speaks to Byline Times about why she has triggered this latest Lords reform attempt, and whether the new Government could get behind it.

Andy Burnham has made no secret of his desire to move away from a fully-appointed upper house. Is this his chance?

Josiah Mortimer: What inspired you to launch this effort? I saw that a few Conservatives objected at First Reading…

Baroness Smith: I joined the Lords just over two years ago. When I joined, I was quite clear in my view that the system doesn’t work in the way it’s structured and isn’t really delivering the best outcomes for people. That’s particularly because being a member of the House of Lords is a job for life. I also don’t believe that having titles helps people’s understanding of what happens in a second chamber.

So this is a Bill I’ve put forward based on the points I made just over two years ago. There’s a Private Members’ Bill ballot at the beginning of every parliamentary session, after the King’s Speech. This was the first one I entered, and I was very lucky and came through at number six.

Then in June, I believe, I had [the] First Reading of the Bill. There was some opposition to that, which is really quite unusual. I’m pretty sure the last time there was opposition at First Reading, it was something to do with the disestablishment of the Church. So it doesn’t seem to happen often. But hopefully I’ll have my Second Reading this Friday.

JM: “Honour” isn’t the right word, but it must mean it’s ruffled a few feathers in the second chamber. Was it Conservatives who were objecting?

BS: I believe so. It was those sitting on the Conservative benches. I couldn’t tell you exactly who, because it just happened in the moment. But Hansard picked up on it, so it’s been recorded.

JM: Why do you think it has triggered, or will trigger, such opposition? Maybe that’s a dangerously obvious question, but is it that a lot of people could lose out from this potential reform?

BS: I do understand why there would be opposition. But to be honest, the Bill I’ve drafted and put forward is really modest. It doesn’t go as far as setting out exactly what the second chamber’s model should look like. What it does do is force a public consultation, perhaps through citizens’ assemblies, and force the Government to implement their own manifesto pledge.

You’ll remember that Labour’s general election manifesto had a paragraph on constitutional changes, and they’ve made progress on a few of those. They’ve removed the link between being born into a title and being a member of the House of Lords, so the Hereditary Peers Bill has passed. They’re also looking at the retirement age and participation requirements.

But there’s also a pledge in there that they haven’t talked about at all: taking the first steps necessary to replace the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that’s more representative of the nations and regions. That’s what my Bill focuses on: putting that back on the table. People voted for it because it was in the manifesto, and I’m trying to drive forward the change they promised.

JM: Have you had any soundings from the newish Government, or from Labour figures? Do you sense there’s an openness to it?

BS: I haven’t had an official Government response. That’s what I’ll get on Friday at Second Reading. But I’ve been working with a number of Labour MPs on making this case, and some Labour peers are down to speak on Friday who I think will mostly be speaking in support. So there is support within Labour itself, but it’s about what the Government and the leadership do.

When I tabled this, Starmer was Prime Minister, and now Burnham is. I think that maybe opens up a bit more hope, because I don’t think it was on Starmer’s agenda. But during the Makerfield by-election, Burnham did talk about the House of Lords and how it wasn’t defensible. So I suppose the question is whether that change in leadership changes whether something will be done in this area. I don’t know yet. I feel that if it was going to happen, we would have seen a plan. But I’m hoping to push and make the case, and there are a lot of Labour MPs who agree with me on that.

JM: Second Reading on Friday will be the first proper debate on this. Given your placing in the ballot, if it goes through Second Reading, is it likely to get more time, or is that TBC?

BS: It’s hard to tell with parliamentary time. Being high up in the ballot gives me more of a chance of getting it through. After Second Reading, people can table amendments if they’d like to, and then I could have a Committee Stage. It’s possible.

My colleague Dafydd Wigley had a Private Member’s Bill in the last session on the Crown Estate, and I think he was actually balloted at a lower position than me. I’m higher up at number six, and he managed to complete the stages in the Lords for his Bill.

But it’s really hard to tell, because you never know. You could have an early general election and then you don’t have the time. What I plan to do is get it through the Lords if I can, or at least get the Lords to vote on it. I think that would be an important thing to do.

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JM: Even if it doesn’t progress, I guess the purpose of the Bill is perhaps to hold Labour’s feet to the fire on their commitments. Burnham has spoken out in favour of Lords reform. Would you hope there’s more openness to it from Andy Burnham than from Keir Starmer?

BS: I think so. If you look at the Bill I’ve drafted side by side with their manifesto, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to support it in terms of what they believe in. But if this isn’t the mechanism going forward, I would still see it as a win if we get some movement from the Government. It’s also about reminding them of what they’ve pledged, and that there are people in the Lords who are happy to help them on this, including myself. There are other peers on the crossbenches, as well as in their own party, and the Lib Dems have quite a lot of seats in the Lords too. That’s a great number of votes they could rely on to pass something like this.

JM: A slight detour: what’s happening with the retirement age and getting the numbers down? It feels like things have gone quiet on that front. I know there was a report a while ago. Do you think that’s actually going to happen? That movement has come from within the Lords itself, hasn’t it?

BS: Yes. The Retirement and Participation Committee report came back to us a few months ago, and there was a debate on it. I’m not particularly hopeful that the Lords will move very fast on this, because the mechanism being used is an internal one: the Lords adopting it into its own ways of working as a chamber. I imagine there will be opposition, particularly to the retirement age, from the Conservatives, and they have the greatest number of seats in the Lords, so I don’t think it would be that easy to get passed. Although it is a manifesto pledge, so I think it would be a bit appalling for the Conservatives to block something like this.

I don’t disagree with that pledge itself, but I don’t think it does much about the deeper foundations of why the system doesn’t work and why it needs improving. A retirement age and a set minimum for how often people should show up should already exist in the first place. It doesn’t change the fundamental points: the roles are for life, and people are appointed in the first place, usually by former Prime Ministers. I think those things are much more important. But it’s good practice to have a retirement age in every workplace, and to have minimum expectations for your role.

JM: I’m always interested, when something like this is proposed from within the Lords, in what the interpersonal consequences are. Does it make for awkward wanders around the parliamentary corridors? Does it make things difficult for you?

BS: To be honest, I’ve been very open from day one. Those who feel strongly opposed to the views I’ve expressed, I just don’t tend to work with. But there are many people I do work with on a great many different topics, particularly devolution in Wales, women’s rights and violence against women and girls.

On this, I’ve also been quite honest about the fact that I include myself. I’m not campaigning just to remove everyone else from their roles, but myself too, to make it a fairer system. That’s ultimately what I believe in: making it a fairer system for society. I think some people respect that, even some who disagree with my position but respect why I feel that way. And a number of peers do agree with what I’ve proposed. I think that’s because I’ve made the case in a way where I’ve been happy to take constructive criticism.

JM: As you said, you’ve left the outcome fairly open. What’s your personal ideal set-up for a second chamber?

BS: I’ve left the outcome open because I think the best way to make change on this particularly controversial issue is in small steps that keep the ball moving, so that we get to the end model eventually.

What I believe is that there needs to be a link between the electorate and the people who are placed there. I don’t necessarily think it needs to be 100% elected, but I think it needs to be majority elected. As part of that model, you could also look at an indirect election route. For example, the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and Stormont could choose people from within their parliaments to take seats there as well. And then there are different types of communities, including industry. Perhaps different occupations could elect someone to represent them in the chamber.

There are also models involving citizens’ assemblies and how they could work. I think we could be more innovative in how we use committees. In future, committees could be more like citizens’ assemblies, where you could appoint ordinary people. On subject-based matters, you could also appoint experts in that field to a committee to look at something. Just because someone’s an expert in a specific area, I don’t think it means they should be able to legislate on everything. But there is a way of including them in what we do.

So there are loads of options out there, which are really interesting ways both to make our legislation better and to build a bit more trust in politics and in Parliament as an institution, bringing people with us so they feel part of the decision-making.

JM: Bigger picture: do you think this is something the public care about, or could be encouraged to care about? There’s so much going on with the cost of living. How hard is it to make constitutional issues like this matter to the public?

BS: It is hard, because it’s not one of your bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living crisis, housing and health, and I 100% get that. But it’s actually something that underpins all of those, because it’s about how you address inequalities.

If the people in the room making decisions on health, education and cost of living interventions all come from the same background and walk of life, and ordinary people don’t really know how those decisions are made, I think that’s when you get bad outcomes. That’s when you create barriers without even realising. For example, I do wonder, when we look at the welfare system, how many people in that room have actually been through it themselves and realise how difficult it is to navigate. I don’t think the people in the room necessarily wanted that to be people’s experience of the system. I just don’t think they actually understand it.

That’s why it matters for the bigger picture. And if you ask the public, and there are plenty of YouGov polls on it, they do favour having an elected House. If you look at their level of trust in different institutions, there are clear statistics on that too. If you don’t have people from all those different walks of life in the room making those decisions, it’s never going to work for those people.

There’s quite a range of speakers, actually. There are 15 signed up, which is quite a lot for a Private Member’s Bill on a Friday. So I do wonder why that is…

JM: Do you think it’s a sort of filibuster attempt?

BS: Not necessarily. I think we’ll hear a few different perspectives. Frances O’Grady, the former General Secretary of the TUC, is down to speak. But there are also some Tories who I think were the ones showing opposition at First Reading, so it’ll be interesting to see what they say. Ann Taylor of Bolton, who chaired the committee on retirement and participation, is speaking, which will be interesting. David Blunkett is speaking too, though I’m not sure what his own views are. So there’s a range of people speaking on Friday, and we’ll see what positions they take.

But the point here is to keep the ball moving. This is something the Government said they believe in, so I think we need to test them on that.

The bill is available to read here.

Reform UK is currently attempting to fight off new allegations of systemic racism amongst its members and councillors. Yet Byline Times investigations over several years have documented how senior figures of the party have cultivated far-right extremists, promoted racist pseudoscience and argued that ancestry determines who can be “English”.

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BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

The decision to leave the EU heralded a decade of damage for the UK. Since 2016, the British economy has shrunk by approximately 8% compared with what it would have been had the UK remained in the European Union, with trade down a striking 18% compared with previous forecasts.

Employment and wages have been heavily suppressed, with the value of the pound still lower than it was before the Brexit vote.

A plan that was sold as being about opening the UK up to the wealth of the world has instead made it a poorer and more insular place.

But the damage – perhaps most significant – has also been political and cultural.

Before Brexit, British politics was fought mostly on the grounds of policy and ideology. For decades, ‘tax versus spend’ and ‘investment versus cuts’ were the battlegrounds that most elections were waged on.

History is not entirely written in distinct chapters, and one era will always bleed into the next. But history will undoubtedly look back at the referendum as the moment when British politics shifted decisively away from its former trajectory.

The terms of that shift were clearly set out during the campaign.

On one side, Remain campaigners focused on geopolitical and economic issues; while their Leave opponents focused on conjuring false statistics and scare stories about marauding armies of dark-skinned invaders.

In a battle between complicated political ideas and simple cultural scare stories, the simple scare stories won out. It was a turning point – not just for Britain’s place in Europe, but for politics’ place in our culture.

Lying and ‘Lefty Woke’

Political parties began heavily prioritising emotion over facts and fearmongering over hope. In this new – more cynical – era, confident dishonesty became the most prized asset.

Boris Johnson, a former journalist who’d been sacked twice for lying, was elevated to Prime Minister. Dominic Cummings, the former director of the Vote Leave campaign (who came up with the ‘£350 million a week’ NHS red Brexit bus slogan), was given the job of running his entire political agenda.

It was a shift also reflected in the media.

Political journalism, which was once focused on analysing competing policies and ideologies, became akin to sports commentary with journalists reduced to speculating on which competing piece of political dishonesty would best ‘cut through’ with the public at any given time.

In this new culture, plans to deport migrants to offshore detention centres were no longer discussed in terms of practicality or even ethics, but were dissected in terms of how they set the ‘narrative’ for opponents to respond to. When such simplistic policies failed to actually deal with the complex issues surrounding migration, Britain’s culture warriors instead searched for new battlegrounds.

Trans people, who make up a tiny minority of the population, became the next big target. At successive Conservative Party Conferences, ministers stood up to deliver speeches lambasting gender-neutral toilets while accusing their opponents of hating women.

At its cultural peak in 2022, the then Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak – an incredibly mild-mannered man who looked like he would struggle to fight his way out of a paper bag – promised to bravely fight against what he called the “lefty woke culture that is trying to cancel our history, our values, and indeed our women”.

Much of the media followed suit with this framing. Every major interview with a leading Labour politician seemed to contain at least one question about whether men could ever be women, or women could ever have penises.

Meanwhile, the public started to look elsewhere.

As politicians and journalists continued to focus on these niche ‘culture war’ obsessions, a public increasingly disillusioned with a government that ignored their material concerns began to turn away from the Conservatives in ever greater numbers.

The result was the party’s worst general election defeat in living memory and the return of the first Labour Government in 14 years.

But, though Keir Starmer became Prime Minister with a promise to return politics back to “service”, his Government was quickly mired in exactly the same culture war battles that helped bring down his predecessors.

With the help of his then Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney – a proto-Cummings figure whose brief was more about messaging than delivery – Starmer’s Government became focused on winning over what McSweeney described as the “hero voters” who had backed Reform UK in the 2024 General Election.

In a landmark speech, Starmer warned that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” and that high net migration figures had caused “incalculable damage” to British society.

The result was the ignition of a new culture war within the Labour Party itself. Its electoral coalition, which until that point had been dominated by liberal-minded, university-educated voters in metropolitan areas, fractured in half.

In a more measured political environment, one might have expected both the main political parties to react to these kinds of setbacks by reorienting themselves back towards the sorts of basic material issues that previously dominated British politics.

But, with Nigel Farage’s Reform still in the ascendant, Labour clung to the belief that elections would be won and lost on the cultural battlefield.

The Conservatives, who had arguably been more damaged by this mindset than any other party, also doubled down on this belief, electing in Kemi Badenoch a leader whose entire career had been forged in the heat of the culture wars.

‘Politics of Place’

Throughout this period, there were signs that an alternative approach was possible.

In London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan won repeated re-election as Mayor with large majorities, precisely through focusing on the sort of core material issues that were being ignored elsewhere.

In Manchester, too, Andy Burnham retained huge popularity as the region’s Mayor by focusing on what he called the “politics of place”, while eschewing the far more nebulous concerns of culture warriors.

Burnham’s success was particularly interesting in that it focused on appeals to unity rather than division. His address at the 2025 Labour Conference was notable in its attempt to unify party members behind a common progressive agenda – in stark contrast to Keir Starmer, who devoted his own speech to lashing out at what he described as the “extreme” views of “snake oil merchants” on the left.

At the time, Burnham’s interventions were derided by most commentators, who predicted he had killed off his chances of ever entering No 10. Yet, what they failed to understand – and what Burnham had already anticipated – was that the arc of British politics was already turning in his direction.

Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election, in the face of a typically divisive campaign by Reform, paved the way for him to root this unifying “politics of place” back in the heart of Westminster.

It is a political project that is now well underway.

Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister at the Labour Party Conference in September was remarkable in its return to the sort of material concerns so long ignored by his predecessors.

Unlike Starmer, who devoted most of his final conference speech to attacking his political opponents on the right and left, Burnham ignored such battles in favour of making a direct, emotional, and political appeal to the country at large.

His speech – in which he was forced to pause for extended periods to fight back tears as he spoke about his recently deceased father, Roy – focused on trying to tell a deeply human and personal story about where the country had gone wrong during the past decade and where he could start to turn it around.

Prepared over many weeks, with Burnham working on the text until the very last minute – outside of the political influence of his aides – his address eschewed the niche culture war obsessions of his predecessors in favour of a broad and compelling narrative about national pride and renewal.

It did not mention his opponents in the Conservatives or Reform once.

After a long decade in which Westminster politicians had divided the country into competing cultural armies, Burnham shifted the agenda back towards a unifying politics of care, democracy, and fairness.

It is a shift that is already having a broader impact.

Reform, the rise of which has so dominated the political and media agenda in recent years, is now polling at its lowest level for almost two years, with the ratings of its cultural warrior-in-chief – Nigel Farage – also falling through the floor.

Zack Polanski, who first rose to prominence because of his success as a social media warrior, has also seen support for his Green Party plummet amid an internal battle over a motion declaring all Zionism to be racism. Days after it was passed at the party’s Conference, Polanski lost the Holborn and St Pancras by-election to Labour.

Even the Conservative Party, whose leader was selected on the basis of her culture war credentials, now appears to be slowly turning back towards the sort of material economic issues that it has so neglected in recent years.

Kemi Badenoch’s own Conservative Conference speech was most notable for its condemnation of Reform’s descent into ethnonationalist politics and its MP Suella Braverman’s questioning of the Englishness of black England football players.

Burnham appears to now be taking back control of our politics, with his opponents fighting to keep up.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Britain’s culture wars are entirely over. After all, nothing is more likely to excite the culture war dead-enders than Burnham opening the door to a re-run of the 2016 EU Referendum. And, having set up such an ambitious programme of action, it remains to be seen whether his Government can deliver it.

Yet, for the first time in a generation, Britain is now led by someone capable of telling a very different story about what politics should be concerned with – and appears willing to engage in the fights necessary for the change he believes the country needs.

After a decade of endless social media debates about wokeness and patriotism, the UK is now led by someone willing to ‘rip off the plaster’ and engage in the sorts of difficult material issues that actually affect most people’s lives – whether it be social care, the cost of living, or this country’s place in Europe.

By rooting politics in the physical and lived world, rather than a virtual social media battlefield, Andy Burnham has a real opportunity to seize control of the coming era. All the signs from his first Conference speech in Liverpool are that it is an opportunity he is determined to take advantage of.

Adam Bienkov is Political Editor of Byline Times

This article appears in the new edition of Byline Times monthly magazine available now in print and digital form.

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Buried deep in the Hannah Arendt book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a reference to Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck. Arendt calls Reck’s diary “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period”, and I have been devouring it.

Reck, a conservative who wrote books on German history to draw parallels to the Nazis – right under their noses – never deviated in his diary from his hatred of Hitler and his loyalists.

On 11 August 1936, Reck wrote:

“For more than 42-months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago could have sunk into this stupor.”

He was forced to bury the pages of his diary on his land near Munich, and I read each entry as a gift, allowing me to draw my own parallels to America’s current troubles.

On 9 November 1937, Reck writes that high-ranking Nazis gave themselves fake backstories and pedigrees. Of Nazi military leader Hermann Göring, he writes:

“We spoke of the origins of this dainty fellow, the son of a Rosenheim waitress, who had not succeeded in gaining admission to a Bavarian cadet corps… now, of course, along with a fantastic coat of arms, Herr Göring has had a pedigree drawn up which traces his descent to some Westphalian general of the early Middle Ages. Obviously mentally deranged, he now takes himself to be the King of Prussia…”

In a long since forgotten story from a decade ago, Trump was accused of plagiarising a family crest. He branded his US properties with a stolen coat of arms. In a New York Times report from 2017, Trump’s heraldic arms was revealed to be “a near identical copy of one registered in 1939 by Joseph Edward Davies. The copy, printed on everything from golf carts to socks, made a single small change: where the original said ‘Integritas’, now it says ‘Trump’.”

Replacing “integrity” with “Trump” could not be a more perfect metaphor for a regime built on “Big C” corruption.

I return to Reck’s diary for more on Nazi loyalists:

“But this is how they all are… all of them act the ‘classa dirigente’, have fantastic coats of arms drawn up, compose even more fantastic pedigrees… worst of all are the females… loaded down with the stolen jewels of noble families… made up to resemble something midway between a movie star and a cocotte.”

American Parallels

Just this week, Trump’s new former press secretary Katie Zacharia, who has a history of pyramid schemes and TV punditry, turned out to not be a lawyer although she calls herself one. Being seasoned at lying on camera is a job requirement for Trump’s White House staff, which includes numerous TV personalities, including Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Fox personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. This week, Guilfoyle resigned her post after multiple pay-to-play reports about seeking money in exchange for administration access.

And Ric Grenell, who once led a stalking brigade against me on Twitter, also made headlines this week. Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba just accused Grenell, Trump’s ex-intelligence director and former executive director of the Kennedy Center, of “failing to deposit millions of dollars donated by her Turkish billionaire husband to the Kennedy Center.”

Each of these players in Trump’s orbit also has something vital in common: they spread the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Two weeks before the midterm elections in the US, the White House reality TV show is throwing everything against the wall to offer distractions from the very serious fact that 2020 election deniers populate Trump’s administration, in extremely high-level places and are deeply embedded in formal and informal positions of power.

In August, I attempted to write a comprehensive report in my Hot Type column warning about all the ways Trump was planning to steal the upcoming midterm elections:

“Since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025, he’s threatened state elections officials; continued to spread the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him and relentlessly touted imaginary ‘massive voter fraud’. In January, his FBI led a raid on a Georgia election office. He’s claimed Chinese interference in the election without offering evidence, he has threatened to use ICE agents and the US military to intimidate voters and seize ballots, and he has openly floated the idea of declaring a national emergency to subvert the outcome of the elections or to even prevent them entirely.

The chaos Trump is stirring up, which also includes complaints about ‘rogue judges’ out to sabotage elections, are designed to stir up violence by loyalists, as well as exhaustion and doubt from the general public over the reality of election outcomes.

Lest we forget: he already attempted one coup.”

But as I wrote that column, I realized a proper evaluation of the threats would exceed the Mueller Report in length, because Trump’s war on the US elections also includes a massive number of Big Lie foot soldiers, who are actively working to destabilize and discredit election results, past and future.

Election Deniers Assemble

In new research from States United Action, there are a reported “200 election deniers in 43 states on the midterm ballots”.

“The election denial movement is showing up across every facet of our democracy—from the ballot box to the White House,” said Kelly Rader, research director at States United Action, a non-profit based in Washington DC.

Beyond the ballot, there are so many deniers within the federal government, it’s hard to even know where to begin.

But I suppose we start with the FBI Director Kash Patel, who tweeted on Thursday “From Russia, with Love.” Patel is criminally investigating “irregularities” in the 2020 presidential election, seizing voting records at the Fulton County election center in Georgia and the subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County in Arizona.

It appears these moves could be a set up to overturn the 2020 election results, which would then make Trump a three-term president retroactively, and pave the way for him in 2028. Just a thought.

Patel, who avoided directly answering questions about the Big Lie in his Senate confirmation hearing last year, also spread disinformation about a Chinese plot to throw the election to Joe Biden.

And then, of course, there’s the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who organized more than 100 House Republicans to sign a brief filed in support of a lawsuit from Texas’ Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton, asking the Supreme Court to invalidate Joe Biden’s wins in the four states that won him the Electoral College — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Both of Trump’s Attorney Generals, former AG Pam Bondi and current AG Todd Blanche, played aggressive roles in promoting the Big Lie, as did current Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin.

Among some of the lesser known deniers in positions of power are Heather Honey, who spread lies during the ballyhooed Maricopa County audit. Despite no election experience, Honey is now the deputy assistant for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.

Honey is closely allied with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who worked for Trump and was part of a cell of lawyers behind the fake elector scheme in Georgia, an attempt to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the 2020 results. Mitchell now runs a non-profit spending millions to fill election litigation coffers, including reports of a $72,000 payment to a consultant firm owned by Honey, who has collaborated with Mitchell on election fraud investigations.

Former Colorado elections clerk and convicted felon, Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2024 for tampering with voting machines, just had a meeting with Trump to discuss “election integrity”. Trump ran a pressure campaign to get Peters’ sentence commuted this summer.

Election denier Kurt Olsen is now working on a “special project” at the White House tied to 2020 investigations, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to Olsen, Clay Parikh is a “special government employee”, brought in to investigate fraud claims in the 2020 election, and appears in the FBI affidavit that propelled the search of Fulton County’s elections office. He regularly acts as a witness in cases involving election “fraud” and voting machines, including Kari Lake’s failed attempt to reverse her defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race.

Lake’s campaign lawyer who led attempts to reverse her defeat, Harmeet Dhillon, is now leading the Justice Department’s push to get unredacted voter roll lists from every state, including suing states to force them to hand over the data.

Big Lie superspreaders also include Eric Neff, the acting chief of the voting section of the US Justice Department, which has a cell of deniers working to gain access to registration lists and actively investigating swing states that went to Biden in 2020.

In addition to the White House and the DOJ, you will also find election deniers in the Defense Department. Among them, Patrick Weaver, Pete Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; Marci McCarthy, director of external engagement for the Defense Department’s chief information officer. McCarthy is another associate of Cleta Mitchell.

There are so many 2020 election deniers embedded within the US government - JD Vance, Stephen Miller, anyone? - it appears to be a resume requirement. But I think I will end on a special mention: Jeanine Pirro, the current US attorney in Washington and former Fox News host. Pirro used her Fox show to bullhorn voting system lies after Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, and Fox ultimately paid out nearly a billion dollars for those lies and many others. In her current role, Pirro wields the kind of administrative power that Trump lacked in 2020.

I am writing this second report, so Americans brace for impact. In the time I’ve gathered evidence about the deniers within, white powder has been sent to election offices, conjuring reminders of the dozens of 2024 bomb threats on election day, and a headline just landed on my desk about a computer “glitch” in Texas affecting 600,000 voters.

I am sure another staffer/election denier of Trump’s White House has done something awful to redirect our focus to their ongoing shitshow and away from the Very Real Threats facing America at this moment.

And so I return to Friedrich Reck’s diary, where buried in vignettes from history, I find a witness to unbearable madness:

September 1938

“Homeward-bound from Berlin… I saw endless trains loaded with artillery and munitions rolling towards the border. Germany, by which I mean this latest generation, carefully nurtured in the precepts of highway robbery, is indeed in a most unusual state of mind today. It regards the will of this so-called Führer as a kind of cosmic law, and all opponents, even those outside the Reich’s borders, as criminals… And what if the others were finally to take courage in hand and say ‘No’ to this Führer grown drunk on the success of his political burglaries? It could be that the shock of learning that he is not, as he has gradually come to believe, the centre of the world, would be enough. That moment when, for the first time, he does not get his way, he might well simply disappear from the stage.”

In 2026, let us will it so.

Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.

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In the UK, I am frequently struck by the number of people who hope that the EU will go out of its way to help the UK rejoin the bloc, because the circumstances around the referendum were so flawed, the vote itself was so close, many of them personally did not support Brexit, and because growing numbers of voters appear now to regret their decision. But, this is asking the EU to overlook the long history of British ambivalence towards it, and the repeated slurs and lies circulated by British politicians about the UK-EU relationship, which created the toxic environment in which the Vote Leave campaign succeeded.

Even if public opinion is changing, the EU cannot ignore the fact that a significant part of the UK’s political establishment still backs Brexit, and in some quarters, would even like to go further, for example, by taking the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Unfortunately, because I count myself amongst those yearning to overturn Brexit, the EU simply cannot give special treatment to a country which remains so conflicted, and still does not display at a political level the unified seriousness of purpose required to fully mend relations with the bloc.

The same applies to how the rest of the world witnesses, and must deal with, the United States today. It is not enough for many Americans, genuinely appalled by the Trump administration, to say that they personally did not vote for this. It is not enough for many Americans to say that they personally do not agree with what the administration is doing. It is not enough for many Americans to say that the Trump administration does not represent what they personally believe America to be as a country.

The world can only deal with what America is, right now, as a country.

And right now, America IS a country led by a man who seems unable to distinguish between allies and autocrats, who IS slapping tariffs on America’s traditional democratic partners, who IS forging deals with countries whose authoritarian nature is the antithesis of everything the “real” America is supposed to represent, such as Russia, and IS bullying Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s war of aggression against it, to change its heroic wartime leader, Zelensky, and accept dishonourable defeat, despite the dire consequences for its land and people.

Right now, America IS a country which threatened to attack a NATO ally, Denmark, unless it handed over a piece of its sovereign territory, Greenland, to America in perpetuity; which IS bombing boats off the coast of Latin America in violation of maritime law, and thereby conducting extrajudicial killings without any due process; and which DID attack a third country, Iran, without any legal authorisation, either by international bodies or its own Congress.

Right now, America – supposedly the beacon of democracy in the world – IS a country which is meddling in the election processes of other democracies to support favoured candidates; is turning its back on the international institutions set up after world war two to maintain peace and security and alleviate human suffering, is rejecting the international laws designed to prevent mass atrocities and human rights abuses, and is actively undermining the international criminal courts established to hold perpetrators of war crimes and genocide to account.

Right now, America – the richest country on the planet – IS a country which abruptly ended its own humanitarian and development aid to dozens of countries around the world, which independent studies have assessed has already caused the deaths of over 600,000 people globally, most of them children, with millions more excess deaths projected to occur by 2030; and also ended its support for many international organisations and NGOs working to support the most vulnerable and needy people on the planet.

Right now, America – a country founded on immigration – IS a country whose official forces in the course of anti-immigration raids have repeatedly fired at unarmed civilians in the streets; torn children away from their parents; seized thousands of undocumented individuals who have committed no other crimes and detained them in appalling conditions for months with little legal recourse; and IS a country which deports minors to places where they have no known connections or previous lived experience.

Right now, America – a country which claims to cherish the value of human life, down to the unborn child – IS a country which continues to do nothing to halt the scourge of gun violence across the nation, which has led to the deaths of over 416,000 people in the past decade, many of them children, including through mass shootings in schools.

Right now, America – the location of many of the world’s top scientific institutes – IS a country which is turning its back on decades of medical advances to make life-saving vaccinations harder or more expensive to get; which continues to keep medical care unaffordable for many people on low incomes or out of work; and is cutting back funding or dismantling its leading programmes on global diseases and pandemics.

Right now, America – home to some of the world’s most beautiful natural parks and wildernesses – IS a country which is rejecting the conclusions of most climate science experts that the planet is facing devastating global warming, largely due to the excessive use of fossil fuels; is weakening standards designed to make machines more fuel efficient; and is opening up more areas of its protected territory to allow for greater exploitation of its precious natural resources.

Right now, America – which codified in its constitution the concept of the separation and balance of powers – IS a country whose legislative body, Congress, failed, twice, to conclude the impeachment of a President guilty of gross abuse of office; which continues to approve the appointment of manifestly unfit individuals to positions of high office in government; which has ceded many of its powers and its prerogatives to the Executive, such as over international trade and the conduct of war; and has repeatedly failed to rein in the excesses of the administration, whether over the conduct of immigration raids, rolling back of institutional safeguards; and abuse of office for personal gain.

Right now, America – whose byword is respect for the rule of law – IS a country whose Supreme Court has systematically rolled back protections for women and vulnerable minorities; validated the dismantling of government bodies and removal of the heads of independent executive agencies without cause; allowed controversial deportations to third countries to proceed; and granted the Presidency sweeping immunity from prosecution.

Right now, America – a country which likes to posit itself as the moral arbiter of the world – IS led by a man who, together with his cronies and hangers on, is clearly using his position to enrich himself and his family; is actively thwarting investigations into the association of many prominent individuals, including the President himself, with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein; and continues to pardon dozens of convicted criminals for the flimsiest of reasons, including those guilty of an unprecedented assault on the nation’s Capitol on January 6 2021.

Right now, America, barely a week after the barbarous incident of a botched execution of a convicted female criminal by lethal injection, IS a country which is proposing to livestream the shooting by firing squad of a paraplegic man, putting it in the company of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the ayatollahs in Iran – thankfully now rescinded in response to a massive uproar at home and abroad; and IS a country led by a President who thinks it appropriate to mock the tragic mauling to death of a mentally disturbed man by a tiger, and repost images of that killing, against the express wishes of the grieving parents.

Look in the mirror, America. Perhaps most of you do abhor what is going on. Perhaps most of you are doing your best to resist. Perhaps most of you are hoping for change to come through elections. But it is not yet enough.

Until you succeed in definitively ending these grotesque actions, definitively holding the perpetrators accountable, and definitively ensuring such actions cannot be repeated, collectively, this IS who you are, IS how the rest of the world sees you, and IS how it will need to treat with you.

If the “Real America” is not this, then it needs to do more than just say so. It needs to BE so.

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As Aaron Sorkin’s new movie The Social Reckoning hits the nation’s multiplexes, detailing the story of whistleblower Frances Haugen’s incendiary leaks about Facebook, Abrham Meareg finds himself caught up in a real life courtroom drama with Mark Zuckerberg’s company about failures which he says led to the death of his father in Ethiopia.

Abrham speaks proudly about his dad, Meareg Amare Abrha, a chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University, explaining in an interview with the Byline Times Podcast that “he was a leading figure in establishing one of the biggest science labs in in Ethiopia” and whose research was internationally recognised. Despite this, Abrham says, “he was quite a humble guy, a down-to-earth personality.” But when civil war broke out in 2021, the professor was falsely identified on Facebook as a supporter and funder of militant Tigrayans. Worse, details of his university department and home address were published online, alongside this poisonous disinformation. Although other users of the social platform rushed to deny the claims made against him, a second post the following day encouraged readers to ‘drink his blood.’

“As soon as I learned about the posts, I just kept reporting it to Facebook, using the online reporting mechanism, so as to capture their attention and to remove those posts,” Abrham recalls. “In my part of the world, disinformation is not just misleading, it is dangerous and deadly.” But Facebook, he says, “just kept ignoring my warnings.” Three weeks later, the professor was followed home by masked men on motorbikes and shot dead as he tried to enter the family home. In a bitter postscript, Abrham recalls that eight days after his father’s murder, the company belatedly responded. “They sent me a message saying that the posts were violating their community standards”.

He is now pursuing legal action against Facebook’s owner Meta in Kenya, where the company’s regional moderation hub is based. Abrham is being supported by tech campaigners Foxglove, who successfully argued last year that the courts in Nairobi have jurisdiction over the case, although Meta are now appealing that judgment. Foxglove’s co-executive director Martha Dark said, “they’ve been trying for years to argue that they shouldn't be held to account in Kenya, and that's now sitting in the court of appeal, and we're awaiting a decision on that any day now.”

At the time of killing, Dark says, “Facebook had about 25 content moderators for Ethiopia, and they spoke just three of the 86 Ethiopian languages. So when you put what Abrham is saying in that context, Facebook simply didn't have the content moderators to be able to moderate the platform in a way that kept it safe.” She argues that “Facebook and Meta's very clear choice has been to optimise and promote content that they think will will keep people's eyeballs on platforms, and ultimately result in more revenue” from advertising.

In the same year as Abrham lost his father, Frances Haugen – the subject of Sorkin’s film – identified herself as the source of leaks to the Wall Street Journal, which revealed that the company knew it was promoting misinformation and hate speech in order to pursue profits, despite being aware it was having dangerous real-world effects. Haugen told the US Senate in October 2021 that Facebook’s algorithms, based on how many engagements a post receives, were “literally fanning ethnic violence”.

Facebook didn’t respond to Byline Times’ request for a response to this article, but has previously said: “We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise and continue to develop our capabilities to catch violating content in the most widely spoken languages in [Ethiopia], including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya." It maintains that Ethiopia is a high priority, even though less than 10% of the population uses Facebook.

Abrham Meareg, meanwhile, still hasn’t received the apology he’s demanding from Zuckerberg, but is relishing the prospect of eventually having his day in court. “It's loud and clear that Facebook is directly responsible for the death of our father by inciting hate and disinformation,” he said. “The cause and the consequences are crystal clear, and it was confirmed by those perpetrators. They were quoting what they saw on Facebook, so as to defend their cruelty. Our dad needs a public apology from Facebook for their misdeeds and ignorance, and even though nothing will bring our dad back, they should pay a restitution fund. We don't want to hear of any other family or any other innocent people suffering the same or worse than us. They have to present clear algorithm changes and invest in their moderators.”

Watch the Byline Times Podcast with Abrahm Meareg and Martha Dark in conversation with Adrian Goldberg here.

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A far-right bookshop endorsed by a series of prominent right-wing figures – which sells books by Hitler, Goebbels, and Mosley, and whose social media account called for millions of people to be removed from Britain – has found itself being looked into by police.

Until August, Oldspeak Bookshop had a physical presence in the leafy and affluent Suffolk village of Long Melford, which has a trade in quirky independent shops.

Oldspeak became a darling of the far-right, stocking white nationalist and Nazi literature before the store said it had been hounded out by “constant hostility” in the area.

Its name is taken from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which “Oldspeak” is the ordinary English that the regime’s engineered language, “Newspeak”, is designed to replace.

Before its closure, the shop displayed a Union flag in its window bearing the words ‘Remigration Now’ – the term typically used to demand the forced expulsion of significant numbers of people, including those here legally, who are not deemed to be ‘British’.

The store’s account on Elon Musk’s social media platform X has frequently endorsed far-right material, including:

• Posting a photograph of the shop front in June with the caption “Mood #millionsmustgo”.

• Replying to GB News’ Tom Harwood, saying that the black England footballer Marcus Rashford’s parents’ nationalities mean “he cannot be English”.

• Quote-tweeting a clip of commentator Connor Tomlinson – a Restore Britain-linked activist and backer of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory – arguing that entire communities four generations deep should be stripped of citizenship, detained, and deported and posting: “Not sure what the problem is here.”

• Replying to a social media user who noted that people dislike a business that backs the disappearance of millions of foreign nationals with: “I don’t think they should simply disappear. Plenty of them should be hanged too.”

• Replying “not yet” with a laughing emoji, when asked whether Nazi flags (including a British Union of Fascists lightning bolt, and Swastika-emblazoned Union flags) are among the ones “these people are terrified about”.

Oldspeak Bookshop continues its trade via its website, where its list of independent publishers includes Antelope Hill Publishing – which the US-based Southern Poverty Law Centre has described as a white nationalist publisher.

Alongside some critical histories of Nazism, titles available through the website include Adolf Hitler’s collected speeches (a blurb states “he may have been Man of the Century”); The Rise of the Reich written by the SS itself (with a description praising its ‘mythic grandeur and martial clarity’); British Union of Fascists Leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s My Life; Joseph Goebbels’ Battle for Berlin; and publications on ‘anti-white racism’ and demands for ‘remigration’. The shop has run a promotion with the discount code “RemigrationNow”.

Despite losing its physical presence, Oldspeak’s owner, Joanne May – who is not from Long Melford and has previously run businesses in Essex – said she is “honoured to return” to the Battle of Ideas festival in London later this month, with a stall selling books by speakers.

It is organised and hosted by the Academy of Ideas think tank – the founder and director of which is Baroness Claire Fox, an independent peer in the House of Lords. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Prominent Backers, and a Police Report

In September, May – who runs Oldspeak’s X account – posted a photograph of two young Muslim men waiting at a bus stop in Long Melford, one dressed in prayer clothes, with the caption: “It’s started.” (Their faces were not blurred in the original).

Responses to the post included “doesn’t look good there. Remigration solves this” and “nowhere is safe I’m afraid!”. One user posted an image of a flamethrower being used with the words “don’t mind me. Just watering my Muslims”.

Suffolk Constabulary told Byline Times that a member of the public had contacted the police “after a reportedly offensive photo was posted on social media that showed two individuals, believed to have been taken from within Long Melford”.

“Enquiries currently remain ongoing, while the two people pictured have been spoken to by officers,” the police spokesperson said. “Anyone with information is asked to contact Suffolk police quoting reference 37/57288/26.”

Local resident and writer Simon Edge told Byline Times he believed May expressed “racist” views which she “flaunted by flying far-right flags outside her shop”.

“What made matters much worse was the public praise she received from some very senior politicians, including members of the House of Lords,” he said.

Edge argues that, if politicians had endorsed a bookshop expressing antisemitism “as opposed to Islamophobia, the media would have been all over it”.

Oldspeak has a number of endorsements on its website, including one apparently by former Conservative and now non-affiliated House of Lords peer, and director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Lord David Frost, in which he praised meeting “Jo” on the shop’s opening day, urging readers to visit and buy. This came before much of the far-right material associated with Oldspeak surfaced online. Lord Frost did not respond to a request for comment.

Another endorsement on social media came from Boris Johnson’s former spokesman Lord Ross Kempsell in July – shortly after Oldspeak posted a photograph of its ‘Remigration Now’ flag.

On X, he tweeted a photograph of a copy of 75 Brexit Benefits by Gully Foyle, captioned “Only 75?” and “with thanks to the great @oldspeak_books”.

Lord Kempsell, publisher of the Guido Fawkes blog, told Byline Times: “I obviously had no knowledge of these posts as I just bought a book from a book stall at a conference and, it goes without saying, I don’t agree with the content.” The post now appears to have been deleted.

Another testimonial is from the criminally convicted far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), which states “support this brave lady,” seemingly referring to owner Joanne May.

There is also a video of James Orr – the recently suspended former Reform UK policy chief and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University – on the BBC podcast Radical with Amol Rajan in an episode first broadcast in July 2025, 10 months before the shop’s ‘Remigration Now’ posts.

On the programme, Orr describes visiting what he calls “the country’s first conservative bookshop”, followed by a shout-out to owner “Jo”. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The Backlash

Announcing the bookshop’s physical closure, in a statement published by GB News on 10 August, Joanne May described the “constant hostility” towards Oldspeak, uncertainty over which customers were genuine, and her decision to go fully online, while also searching for premises “in a friendlier location”.

Long Melford’s local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times, called Oldspeak a “right-wing bookshop” and prominently featured claims it had been hounded out of the village over its politics.

Oldspeak Limited applied to be struck off the Companies House register on 18 August, with a first Gazette notice published on 25 August. The website currently has a £5 sale on all items.

In response to Byline Times, Oldspeak Bookshop’s X account said: “It isn’t illegal to close a limited company and run as a sole trader instead.”

A planning application for a bookshop and café went to Babergh District Council in February 2025, according to GB News, and Oldspeak opened shortly after approval. It regularly held talks by far-right authors.

Resident Simon Edge described its positioning on its launch as respectably conservative, heavy on conservative philosopher Roger Scruton – who still has a dedicated section on the website – plus the (often co-opted) socialist writer George Orwell, and right-wing historian David Starkey.

Oldspeak’s social media presence, however, soon became more extreme – building an audience by amplifying harder-right accounts, as well as Islamophobic and ‘Great Replacement’ material, both in its stock and in its social media posts.

Its website describes it as “Britain’s ONLY dissident bookshop” – having previously been billed as “a home for conservative thought”.

In February, Oldspeak’s account posted: “Arm your mind. Restore Britain,” an apparent nod to Rupert Lowe MP’s far-right party.

In March, owner May posted on it: “I remember me and my mum talking over 20 years ago about not voting for the BNP because the powers that be might find out our names and pass them to Muslims when they get in power and hang us. And then we laughed thinking we’d gone over the top.”

In May, the account hit out at “certain Tory/Reform types” being “sneering and dismissive” towards Restore Leader Rupert Lowe. “Why the hostility towards an Englishman who’s actually willing to stick his head above the parapet and fight for his fellow Englishmen?” it posted.

In response to Byline Times’ questions about the bookshop and the photograph of two Muslim men she posted on X, Joanne May said: “Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

May then blocked the author’s account on X, with some of her followers directing abuse at this reporter, including racist language. One account – registered as having been set up in Croatia – sought to identify “the Jew” behind this publication’s right of reply requests.

May shared this reporter’s Byline Times email in full to her X followers, saying: “Oh no. @josiahmortimer thinks I’m going to be sitting at home worried that he’s spending his time writing about me.”

“They also think I might believe they will print any answers I give in good faith. They have also never heard of sarcasm. @BylineTimes” – appearing to refer to some of Oldspeak’s social media posts that this publication put to her.

On 9 October, the bookshop’s X account posted a video of a visit from police about its post photographing the two Muslim men in the village, and responses featuring racist comments. In it, a police officer says: “I would advise that you be very aware of what you are posting.”

Joanne May’s video of the interaction has received more than 2,000 shares. May falsely named Simon Edge as responsible for the police visit.

He told Byline Times he received a “deluge of poisonous verbal abuse and physical threats” from people in the aftermath. Edge has passed full details of those messages to the police.

Josiah Mortimer is Chief Reporter at Byline Times

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

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Reform UK’s internal inquiry into alleged foreign donations, which found no breach of electoral law, was conducted by a British barrister who represented US President Donald Trump in failed litigation over the Trump–Russia dossier.

Adam Richardson has also acted personally for the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and worked with Dan Jukes, a subject of the Reform inquiry, on selecting candidates for the party.

The dossier, produced by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, had collated information suggesting that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign secretly colluded with Russian officials. It was not meant for public consumption, but was leaked to the press in 2017.

Richardson conducted the internal review along with Reform’s general secretary, Tom Waterhouse. Their 27-page report was published weeks after an undercover investigation into James Orr and Dan Jukes, two of Farage’s closest aides, seemed to show the two soliciting unlawful foreign donations.

In response to Byline Times, Reform UK confirmed that Richardson acts as legal advisor to the party and has an “existing client-barrister relationship with Reform UK”, but denied that this “compromises the independence of his assessment of electoral law in the internal report.”

As the party’s secretary, Richardson is one of a small group of Reform UK officials with final approval over its parliamentary candidates, alongside Dan Jukes. Years earlier, he had acted for Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm which harvested personal Facebook data for micro-targeting voters during major US electoral campaigns, and which had provided preliminary support for the campaign to leave the European Union.

His brother, Matthew Richardson, was involved in 2015 discussions over a proposed arrangement between UKIP, Cambridge Analytica and the campaign group Leave.EU. Parliamentary testimony identifies Matthew as the lawyer of Robert Mercer, the Trump megadonor behind Trump’s first presidency, who also invested in Cambridge Analytica.

The undercover investigation into Reform UK by the non-profit reporting project Verbatim was broadcast by Channel 4 News in September. Reporters posing as a US financier and his UK-based son discussed a possible £500,000 donation to Reform and separately paid £32,500 for three opinion polls. Orr and Jukes denied wrongdoing and stepped back from their roles.

Reform UK is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police due to the allegations.

The Trump-Russia Dossier

Adam Richardson previously represented Donald Trump in appeal proceedings against Orbis Business Intelligence, founded by Christopher Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia desk. Steele had compiled a dossier of raw intelligence alleging links between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian Government. The dossier had originally been commissioned as ‘opposition research’ by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and was meant for further investigation rather than public consumption.

Denying the allegations in the Steele dossier, Trump sued under data-protection law, but the High Court dismissed his claim in February 2024, and permission to appeal was refused. Trump subsequently failed to pay an interim £290,000 costs bill before being ordered to pay Orbis more than £626,000 in legal costs, which remains unpaid. Adam Richardson later also acted for Donald Trump in related professional-negligence proceedings against Trump’s former law firm, Level Law.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the podcast The Rest Is Politics that when he asked Downing Street officials about Russian interference in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union: “I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.” The Government has since said that though the interference occurred, it was “not successful”.

Richardson’s Ties to Farage and Reform

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was himself Adam Richardson’s client in respect of unpaid election expenses.

That personal instruction raises a question about how the Richardson inquiry established what Farage knew about the donations arranged by Jukes and Orr. The report by Richardson and Waterson identified no interview with Farage, nor any account obtained from him, despite reaching conclusions about his lack of knowledge of the payments.

Farage had met the reporters posing as donors over oysters and wine in Clacton. During the recorded meeting, he praised the polling: “It worked. Boom.” After the Channel 4 broadcast, he denied that Reform UK had taken illegal money and said the polls had benefited the party, but had not been commissioned by it.

While Reform UK had said its internal inquiry would proceed “independently and without prejudice”, Adam Richardson’s involvement with the party has extended to helping select its parliamentary candidates alongside Dan Jukes, one of the two aides whose conduct he later reviewed.

In May 2026, The Spectator had identified Adam Richardson and Dan Jukes among a small group authorised to give prospective candidates final approval, describing Richardson as Reform UK’s party secretary and Jukes as Farage’s chief of staff. The account placed both men in the party’s candidate-approval machinery months before the donations inquiry.

Years earlier, Richardson stood for UKIP in the North West at the 2019 European elections. His candidate biography described several years as a senior party official.

A number of other senior Reform UK figures have been his clients, including Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the party’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire; Sarah Pochin, the party’s MP for Runcorn and Helsby; and parliamentary candidate Matthew Goodwin (over campaign leaflets missing legally required printer and promoter details).

Richardson also represented Reform 2025 Ltd in a case to determine whether a parliamentary candidate qualified as an employee.

The Richardson Brothers and Cambridge Analytica

The Richardson brothers’ connections to Farage’s political world extend back to Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting company financed by Trump megadonor Robert Mercer.

Before the Brexit referendum, Matthew Richardson, a former senior UKIP official, helped develop proposed arrangements between Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and the Leave.EU campaign. Emails published by Parliament show that, in November 2015, Cambridge Analytica executive Julian Wheatland told colleagues Matthew was working out the contractual structure between the three organisations.

Wheatland had asked whether Cambridge Analytica could disclose that it had analysed UKIP membership and survey data. “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest,” Matthew replied, saying he would discuss the matter with Leave.EU communications director Andy Wigmore.

Matthew also had professional and personal connections to the family financing the company. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie identified him as “Robert Mercer’s lawyer” in parliamentary testimony in March 2018.

A 2024 High Court judgment records that Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, relied on “her friend” Matthew’s account of the Channel 4 News broadcast exposing Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix.

Adam Richardson’s involvement concerned the subsequent regulatory scrutiny and the company’s collapse. As UKIP’s party secretary, he answered questions from the Information Commissioner investigating political data practices, including services provided to UKIP by Leave.EU. The judge later described one of his answers as “curt and unhelpful”.

Adam then represented UKIP in its unsuccessful 2019 appeal against the regulator’s formal demand for information. Separately, he obtained an administration order for companies within the Cambridge Analytica group following its collapse.

Matthew’s relationship with Rebekah Mercer subsequently extended to Parler, the far-right social media platform she backed. Its former chief executive, John Matze, alleged in a court complaint that she appointed Matthew as one of her designated managers for the platform in July 2020.

Byline Times has previously documented Matthew Richardson’s role as executive director of the Young Britons’ Foundation, a conservative activist training organisation, before his move into UKIP. Both brothers were later advertised as speakers alongside Robert Jenrick, now a Reform MP and the party’s shadow chancellor, at a June 2025 conference organised by the Margaret Thatcher Centre.

The Dispute Over the Polling Payments

The review conducted by Adam Richardson with the party’s general secretary concluded that Dan Jukes had commissioned the polls personally as a contractor and that the party incurred no liability. It criticised the statements by Jukes and James Orr, and recommended changes to party procedures, but found that the proposed £500,000 donation had not been agreed or accepted.

Yet one passage in the report describes James Orr’s involvement in securing payment. The report reproduces a message in which Orr told the purported donor: “Your financial backing of that poll was a huge part of our campaign, so thank you.”

A Labour Party briefing seen by Byline Times has questioned how that account, relating the polls to Reform UK campaigning, could be reconciled with the finding that the polls were Jukes’s personal commissions.

“As a barrister with a specialism in election law, I value my professional relationships with clients from across the political spectrum and approach all instructions with the same independence required”, Adam Richardson told Byline Times. His brother Matthew did not respond to request for comment.

A spokesperson for Reform UK said: “Reform UK instructs Mr Richardson as a self-employed barrister in independent practice. The position of Party Secretary reflects his role as legal adviser to the Party.

“As with all practising barristers, Mr Richardson is subject to professional obligations requiring him to exercise independent judgment, irrespective of the identity of his client.

“We do not accept that his existing client-barrister relationship with Reform UK compromises the independence of his assessment of electoral law in the internal report.”

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

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It has taken ten years: ten years since the first evidence emerged of Russian social-media accounts pushing for Brexit. Eight years since the FBI’s Mueller Report and the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee exposed the extent of Kremlin “information warfare” against the United States and the UK.

And six years since the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report – which revealed Russian financial-influence operations in UK political parties – was suppressed by Boris Johnson.

Speaking on the Rest Is Politics podcast, Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed what many journalists, lawmakers and campaigners have said for years:

“There is certainly misinformation, disinformation that is emanating from Russia into German politics… But I asked the question coming to Downing Street: was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

This is the first time the British state has openly recognised something accepted by other intelligence agencies in the US and Europe, that Brexit was a target of Putin’s disinformation warfare.

Theresa May, while warning Russia that it was being closely watched after the Novichok attack in Salisbury, and expelling an unprecedented number of Russian diplomats, never tasked her intelligence agencies to investigate further.

Her Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, told Parliament that he had seen “nyet… not a sausage” of Russian interference.

However, addressing the UN in late September, Burnham did not shy away from calling out the Kremlin’s attack on democracy: “We have evidence that they tried to interfere with the 2019 general election. We also know that they have tried to stoke tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events,” he said.

Talking to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, he went further, acknowledging that the interference went back to the crucial EU referendum vote, and saying that voters had not been informed “sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas”.

It is an overdue acknowledgement that one of the most momentous constitutional decisions in post-war Britain – decided by a narrow two per cent swing in the referendum vote – might not have been fairly and transparently conducted.

The key figures in the two Leave campaigns – Nigel Farage, for Leave.EU, and Boris Johnson, for Vote Leave – were repeatedly connected to Russian influence networks.

The close proximity of Nigel Farage and Russian officialdom has long been documented. Not only did he deny a documented 2013 meeting with the Russian Ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, and subsequently receive payment for regular appearances on the Kremlin-backed channel RT (formerly Russia Today); he also told GQ that Putin was the leader he “most admired”.

As Carole Cadwalladr and I revealed in 2018 in The Observer, Arron Banks – the major funder of Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, whose £8 million donation set a record at the time as the biggest ever in a British political campaign – made multiple undisclosed visits, along with other officials, to the Russian Embassy in the lead-up to the EU referendum.

During those undisclosed meetings, emails obtained by us revealed discussions of potentially beneficial arrangements over the privatisation of Russian gold and diamond interests..

Banks denied that any Russian money figured in his donations to Leave.EU. But the mere fact of Kremlin interest in Brexit, and in its outcome, is undeniable.

As the DCMS Select Committee reported later in 2018, analysis of social-media accounts suspected of being Russian proxies – and later involved in the well-documented Russian interference in Donald Trump’s 2016 election – played a role in pushing for Brexit.

Meanwhile, as Carole Cadwalladr and I subsequently detailed in our award-winning podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, the Kremlin’s interest in Farage’s party – which was mainly run by the expelled spy Alexander Udod – was channelled through another Russian Embassy operative, Sergei Nalobin, who helped establish Conservative Friends of Russia in 2012.

Beyond Johnson’s links with Nalobin, and with another suspected Russian agent, Joseph Mifsud, the former mayor of London also had a deep connection with the former KGB section chief Alexander Lebedev. Along with his son Evgeny, Lebedev took over The Independent and the Evening Standard in 2008. As Byline Times reported, further connections between Johnson and Russian influencers, including Mifsud, subsequently emerged.

For the next ten years, Johnson was a regular attendee at the often wild Lebedev parties in London and Umbria – even when Alexander Lebedev was working closely with the Kremlin in Crimea following its annexation by Putin in 2014.

During the EU referendum, Johnson blamed the first war in eastern Ukraine on the EU rather than Russia. One of his first actions on becoming prime minister in late 2019 was to ennoble Evgeny Lebedev as a member of the House of Lords, against the advice of the security services. .

From the beginning of his premiership, Johnson sought to suppress the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report on the Kremlin’s financial and political influence operations in the UK.

The report was eventually published in 2020, with some elements redacted for security reasons. As we reported at the time the report found the Government had “actively avoided” looking for Russian interference during the 2016 EU referendum.

Christopher Steele, the former head of the security services’ Russia desk, revealed on Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, that some of those redacted annexes are likely based on his findings that Russian money was channelled into the Brexit campaign.

Following Burnham’s comments, Steele told Byline Times: “We have known that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 Brexit referendum since at least 2017 and whilst it is difficult to quantify exactly what impact this may have had on the vote, the fact that it has never been properly investigated by the British Government is both regrettable and irresponsible.

“Regrettable because the British people have the right to know what role a hostile foreign power, in this case Russia, played in arguably the most consequential democratic decision in modern peacetime and irresponsible, because their failure to do so will have encouraged the Kremlin in its efforts to interfere in UK elections and politics subsequently. There needs to be a full inquiry on Russian interference now, with its suitably sanitised (to protect sources and operational methods) results made public.”

Keir Starmer

While Johnson’s self-interested reasons for not seeing a “sausage” of Russian interference are clear enough, more mysterious has been the inactivity of the Labour Party – especially given the key roles on this issue played by Labour MPs Ian Lucas and Ben Bradshaw.

However, the revelations in the release of the Epstein files concerning former Labour lord Peter Mandelson’s close connections with the disgraced paedophile billionaire may offer some clues..

Emails released by the US Department of Justice earlier this year confirm the proximity between the former peer and one of Putin’s favoured oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska.

Mandelson was sacked by then-prime minister Keir Starmer because of his undisclosed continuing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even after Epstein had been sentenced and imprisoned for sex offences involving a minor. He is currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police for misconduct in public office.

Epstein himself had multiple connections with Russia. The released emails indicate that he was in regular contact with Kremlin officials, introducing them to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.

In an email to Thiel after the EU referendum result, Epstein claimed: “Brexit is just the beginning”, and celebrated the opportunities of a “return to tribalism”.

More examples of Russian interference are bound to emerge. Only last year, Nigel Farage’s close aide Nathan Gill was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for receiving bribes, via proxies, from Putin’s “man in Ukraine”, Viktor Medvedchuk. Police inquiries are still ongoing. Byline Times reported on Gill’s sentencing and his role in promoting Kremlin narratives.

After the Gill affair, the Government announced the Rycroft Review to assess the dangers of foreign interference – but Matthew Rycroft was given a remit extending back only as far as 2019.

For too long, and for political reasons, Brexit has been kept off the agenda in terms of Kremlin meddling.

The extensive nature of Russian influence operations over the past 15 years has compromised the British state and senior politicians to such an extent that they have felt too embarrassed – or too compromised – to investigate fully how extensive it has been.

Burnham’s honest approach offers the possibility of finally coming to terms with the nature of modern hybrid warfare, and with the extent to which British politics has been vitiated by foreign interests and foreign cash.

As Burnham explained in his reference to Germany and France, the point is not to relitigate the EU referendum – although, given the level of interference, there is scope for that.

For the sake of our cognitive security and democratic resilience, it is important to expose the various alternative measures – fake-news sites, online bots, direct social interference, financial inducements, blackmail and assassinations – that Putin has clearly deployed in elections in Moldova, Czechia, Bulgaria and Romania, and is now crucially turning on the looming elections in Germany and France.

The fifth battlespace – information war – was long Putin’s special weapon.

On this hidden front, denied cover by the mainstream media, many of us have been fighting for years like partisans in the mountains.

And finally, the countries and democracies we tried to protect have recognised the reality, and have no excuse not to arm themselves for the next onslaught by investigating the past.

Peter Jukes is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times

Watch Peter Jukes talking to Adrian Goldberg for the Byline Podcast

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This week, on 7 October, it was the birthday of Russia’s tyrannical leader, Vladimir Putin. One of the best gifts he could possibly hope to receive this year would be to have the funding that Ukraine relies on to defend itself from his war cut off. Shockingly, some political leaders in Europe seem to think that this is what should happen.

“We want the war to end,” they say. “Cut off funding for the war, and then Ukraine will be forced to negotiate,” their twisted logic continues.

Believe me, speaking as someone who woke to the smell of a city just impacted by many missiles on the morning of Putin’s birthday, the people of Ukraine want the war to end. But cutting off military and financial aid to Ukraine is not going to magically open the door to a gift-wrapped peace deal. It would be a gift-wrapped invitation to Putin to go further.

The Problem

The problem with this thinking, which is a common theme from leaders of significant political movements in both France and Germany at the moment, is that the Kremlin has not, and will not, agree that it would end the war under those circumstances. There is not one single occasion when Putin or any of his mouthpieces has indicated that, if Ukraine were to stop fighting, (whether due to financial constraints or anything else,) Russia would then reciprocally end the active phase of the “special military operation.”

In France, a leading contender to win the keys to the Elysée Palace is Marine Le Pen, she argues that France can simply no longer afford to provide financial support for Ukraine. With the country carrying a national debt of €3.6 trillion that populist message may well resonate with many voters. However, the average amount of financial assistance to Ukraine from France runs at around €2 billion.

There are, to put this in perspective, one thousand billions in a trillion. France’s financial lifeline to Ukraine is certainly a significant sum, but when stood up against the problem of the national debt it is in rounding error territory. Ms Le Pen, as is common among populists, is being economical with the truth.

In fact, the candidate for the National Rally is not just engaged in a temporary deception of French voters as a matter of political convenience, her track record of being a supplant for Vladimir Putin is quite a long one. This “financial” objection is just the latest way of deceptively presenting a case that supports the war criminal in the Kremlin.

The problem is not limited to France. In Germany, another powerhouse of the European Union, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is also surging in the polls. It, too, wants to cut off all deliveries of weapons to Ukraine and cut all financial aid. It has not, I am sure, checked with Moscow to enquire as to whether this changed set of circumstances for Ukraine would in any way motivate Russia to stop fighting in and against Ukraine. The party could, of course, check with Moscow, because at least 9 AfD members of the German parliament have travelled to Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to play the role of “international observers” for sham “elections” there. They are obviously on good terms with the Russians.

What Binds the Far-Right with Russia?

If we are starting to ask ourselves what it is that binds the far-right across Europe with Russia, we can see a lot more than the shared ideology of being anti-immigrant (racist) and populist (dishonest) and as ever with the standard modus operandi of Putin’s criminal regime, financial ties emerge too.

In the UK, the far-right niche is occupied by the Reform Party of Nigel Farage and their offshoot Restore Party. Farage has a history of claiming that the background of the war in Ukraine comes from “poking the [Russian] bear”, while his former colleague Nathan Gill is spending the next decade in prison for being caught taking Russian money to make the exact same comments in the European Parliament.

As for Restore, they have a policy platform that would cut all foreign aid (without implicitly acknowledging that the greatest casualty in this would be Ukraine) “that does not directly benefit British national security.” That can, on the surface, sound logical.

But let’s play out the hypothetical scenario that aid to Ukraine is cut, and this allows Russia an opportunity to prosecute their war even more brutally against an undefended Ukrainian population. Around 250,000 Ukrainians have sought, and gratefully found, refuge in the UK as they have fled the war since 2022. What would be the impact of another quarter of a million refugees in the UK?

The Costs of Real-Life Scenarios

Here’s where the scenarios get more scary, but they are very real. The fixed part of the equation is that Putin is not going to stop. His war is one of imperial conquest over lands that he believes now – which was not the case 20 years ago, when he was fully OK with Ukraine’s borders as defined by international law – are rightfully his.

The land is one thing, the people who call that land home are another.

It is possible, though not certain, that Putin may be satisfied to take no more than what he refers to as “Novorussia”, which is all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River. It would include million-strong cities such as Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia.

The people who currently live in those places will be faced with a stark choice: accept that you are now Russian, or be tortured and even executed for daring to think otherwise. How many more Ukrainian refugees are going to flood across the borders of Europe in that scenario? What would be the cost of absorbing such a vast number of new settlers across Europe? It would certainly be in excess of the amounts being invested today in the defence of Ukraine.

It seems insane to me that French voters could actually elect a President who has been convicted of fraud, but American voters elected Donald Trump for a second time after his 34 felony convictions and a myriad of reported sexual offences.

It seems equally insane, studying their history, that German voters can turn out en-masse for a party that openly backs a regime in Russia that is, by definition, fascist. Nevertheless, the AfD is on the march.

The result of putting them in power and allowing them to follow through on their stance towards Ukraine would be almost an exact mirror image of the circumstances that led to World War II, whereby an angry society incited to hatred through a perverted form of nationalism decides that it wants swathes of the territories of other countries. The resulting millions of casualties or refugees will be the same too.

Trump has already cut off all aid to Ukraine, leaving Europe to pick up fill the resulting funding gap. The National Rally would do the same. The AfD would do the same. In all three cases, these are very long-term investments from the Russian regime that are, or would be, paying dividends.

While there are dividends to the Kremlin, who pays that bill? The cost is not measured only in dollars or euros, but if it were, the investment made in the defence of Ukraine would be a bargain compared to the costs of an undefended Ukraine.

And the part that is not being considered is where will the next war be? Against whom?

Putin has to have war, his regime only exists and persists because he has convinced his population that wars for “Russian greatness” are both their birthright and death rites. Who will he attack next to satiate the need for violence and domination that are the only distinguishable feature of modern Russian society?

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Reform UK’s suspended head of policy James Orr is the UK chairman of a foundation which hosted an Israeli minister, Bezazel Smotrich, sanctioned by Britain for inciting violence against Palestinians, Byline Times can reveal.

Orr’s fellow director at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and its founding chairman, is Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American Bible scholar who previously praised Rabbi Meir Kahane – the late creator of the Kach movement that was banned by Israel as a terrorist organisation.

The foundation’s latest National Conservatism conference known as “NatCon” took place in Jerusalem earlier in the first week of October and was sponsored by an Israeli NGO sanctioned by both the EU and Canada due to lobbying for the demolition of Palestinian property.

The event has fast become an alliance between the Israeli extreme right and established right-wing forces in the US, Britain and Europe, from President Donald Trump’s administration to Reform and the Conservatives.

Previous NatCon events have been addressed by JD Vance (just before he was appointed Trump’s Vice President), Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and three Conservative MPs who have since joined his party. Vance has also credited NatCon founder Hazony’s work with influencing his politics.

The conference programme for NatCon’s Jerusalem event also advertised Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who publicly defended Lehava, a group Britain has sanctioned and whose leader, Ben-Zion Gopstein, is a disciple of Meir Kahane.

Smotrich, Orr and the Edmund Burke Foundation

At the NatCon event in Jerusalem, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Yoel Smotrich called for permanent Israeli sovereignty over territory held in Gaza and Lebanon, and urged Muslim countries to receive Gazans wishing to leave, presenting the proposal as voluntary rather than forced removal. Britain sanctioned him in June 2025 over his role in inciting violence against Palestinian civilians, imposing an asset freeze and travel ban.

Orr, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, is UK Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and a director of its British company, alongside the foundation’s founder, Yoram Hazony. Hazony is also chairman and a director of the US foundation, which organised the Jerusalem event.

Orr stepped aside as Reform UK’s head of policy on 4 September, after a Channel 4 News undercover report on foreign donations filmed him apparently soliciting illegal donations. An internal investigation by Reform UK this week concluded there was no wrongdoing.

However, a spokesperson for Reform UK told Byline Times that “James Orr stepped down from his role in September and his status hasn’t changed.”

Orr is a prominent intellectual architect of the National Conservatism movement and has been a primary organiser for major NatCon events in Europe and the UK. He did not respond to requests for comment regarding his role in the NatCon event in Jerusalem and his continued role as UK chairman of the host foundation.

The Kahane Connection

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, spoke on the Jewish character of the Israeli state at the NatCon event in Jerusalem. In September 2021, he had joined senior rabbis in a public letter opposing moves in Israel to outlaw Lehava as a terrorist organisation. Lehava campaigns against relationships between Jews and non-Jews.

The UK Government sanctioned Lehava in May 2024, citing its role in facilitating, inciting and promoting violence against Arab and Palestinian communities. On 8 September this year, Britain also sanctioned the group’s leader, Ben-Zion Gopstein, for supporting and inciting violence against Palestinians.

Gopstein is a disciple of Meir Kahane, founder of the racist, ultra-nationalist Kach party, which called for the forced segregation of Jews and non-Jews, and advocated the forced removal of Arabs who refused to accept non-citizen status from Israel. Prior to that, Kahane had founded the Jewish Defense League, classified by the FBI as a right-wing terror group for bombings and shootings against Soviet, Arab, and diplomatic targets. Israel itself would ban Kahane’s Kach party as a terrorist organisation in 1994.

NatCon founder Yarom Hazony, who directs the Edmund Burke Foundation’s UK company with James Orr, praised Meir Kahane in a 1990 Jerusalem Post obituary. He recalled hearing Kahane at Princeton, writing of the racist terrorist that he “thrilled and enchanted us”.

Hazony credited that encounter with religious changes among his circle, while explicitly rejecting Kahane’s politics and violent methods. He wrote: “Neither I nor any of my friends from college ever adopted Kahane’s political views.”

The Sanctioned Sponsor

Byline Times can also confirm that one of the conference’s organisational sponsors included Regavim, an Israeli NGO that the EU says lobbied for the demolition of Palestinian property. The EU sanctioned Regavim in May 2026, and Canada listed it the following month.

The Edmund Burke Foundation’s role in receiving sponsorship from a EU and Canada sanctioned organisation raises questions about the legitimacy of EU nationals participating in the NatCon event. The EU sanctioned the group on 28 May, freezing its assets and barring EU persons from making funds available to it.

The programme listed speakers from at least six EU member states, including Austria’s Harald Vilimsky, who leads the Freedom Party of Austria’s delegation in the European Parliament and is a vice-chair of the Patriots for Europe group; Spain’s Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz of the far-right Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences (ISSEP); Poland’s former president Andrzej Duda; Germany’s Hans-Georg Maaßen, of the Values Union; Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, an MP and former political director to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; and Swedish former diplomat Henrik Schildt.

The foundation’s hosting of UK sanctioned individuals also raises questions about its compliance with UK financial sanctions laws, which prohibit making funds or economic resources available, directly or indirectly, to or for the benefit of a sanctioned person. UK businesses are also expected to comply with all applicable UK sanctions regulations. Failing to do so can incur fines or criminal prosecution.

Neither the foundation nor its founder Hazony responded to request for comment. The UK Foreign Office told Byline Times that “this matter is for the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).” The OFSI, however, declined to comment.

NatCon’s International Reach

NatCon has become a fulcrum of the international far right. In an interview with the late Charlie Kirk, reported by Byline Times in April, Orr named Germany’s Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and other far-right parties across Europe as groups National Conservatism was “helping to” coordinate.

This week’s programme put that ambition into practice. It billed Trump’s counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the President and one of six featured speakers, in the same plenary as Harald Vilimsky of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party. It also listed the former Conservative MP Miriam Cates and Paul Coleman, chief executive of the Prosperity Institute, which is operated by Paul Marshall’s Legatum partners, with whom he owns GB News.

NatCon’s British reach extends to serving and former ministers. At the 2023 London conference, Suella Braverman, now a Reform MP, addressed delegates as Home Secretary. Michael Gove, now editor of The Spectator, also owned by Marshall, spoke as Levelling Up Secretary, and Sir John Hayes, who remains a Conservative MP, was another speaker.

Danny Kruger and Lee Anderson, both now Reform MPs, attended; as did Matthew Goodwin, Reform’s failed candidate in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election.

NatCon’s American reach includes some of the most influential organisations in US conservatism. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke at the Jerusalem event’s opening plenary alongside Smotrich and Hazony. Heritage convened Project 2025, the authoritarian plan for reshaping the US Government for Trump’s second presidency.

The Silicon Valley billionaire and pro-Trump mega-donor Peter Thiel has also spoken at NatCon and signed its statement of principles, alongside Orr and Hazony.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

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The Reckoning Project is a consortium of journalists, researchers, and lawyers, bridging professional gaps, in order to hold the highest powers to account by investigating war crimes and collecting witness testimony from their survivors.

How can a crime committed in Syria be tried in Germany, or one committed under Russian occupation be tried in Argentina? In many places without functioning justice systems, or where the scale of violations is overwhelming, victims of human rights abuses often cannot expect their perpetrators to see consequences for their actions.

But there are options outside the borders of their own state: Universal Jurisdiction means that third countries can prosecute crimes, which are considered to be of such enormous severity that they impact the international community as a whole if they go unpunished.

There are also other options for the justice systems of third countries to be utilised. For example, if either victim or perpetrator later becomes a resident of that state. In this case, loose networks of activists and NGOs can play key roles in advocating for accountability.

In this episode, acclaimed war reporter Janine di Giovanni explores the case of torture.

Our first guest, Reed Brody, was working with Human Rights Watch at the time of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet’s trial in the UK. It was a pivotal moment for him, demonstrating that perpetrators of such crimes could be prosecuted internationally.

“Three months earlier, the international community had adopted the statute of the international criminal court in Rome in July, and now here, October 16, Pinochet is arrested. It looked like this new world is happening,” Brody recalled. “Pinochet was arrested in London, on a warrant from a Spanish judge, for acts allegedly committed 25 years earlier in Chile,” he said.

We tell the story of how one man’s chance encounter with his torturer in a job centre in a small German village led to one of former Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s officials being apprehended and convicted of being a co-perpetrator of torture. The Reckoning Project’s Raji Abdul Salam, a data archivist, recalls the process.

“People started to recognise this specific person in Germany – where there’s a big community of refugees that came from Syria especially after 2015,” he said. While the process was difficult, in that the re-traumatisation of victims had to be avoided (as well as protecting any relatives remaining in Syria), the fact that the perpetrator was present in Germany became a bombshell in German media.

“The prosecutor at a certain point was looking at the guy as not a guy who was only doing the war crime of torture but who systematically administered torture as a way to subdue a certain population,” he recalled. “The prosecutor was so appalled … it took years to process the case.”

We also examine the story of one Ukrainian man tortured by Russian forces in occupied Ukraine. “In the summer of 2022 he was illegally deprived of his liberty, he was tortured with electric currents, he was strangled in order to obtain information, he was intimidated and held in inhumane conditions,” said Tsvetelina van Benthem, a University of Oxford legal scholar and adviser at The Reckoning Project.

A complaint was filed in a court in Argentina in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction – the Latin American country’s legal history (following its own period of regime-supported torture in the 1970s) provided a strong framework to do so.

Listen here to the Byline Times Podcast with The Reckoning Project - Part Three.

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The gruesome failed execution of Christa Pike has re-ignited debate about the death penalty in the United States, but few voices are more emotionally charged than those of families of murder victims who choose to renounce the idea of state-backed vengeance being extracted in their name. Among them is Reverend Doctor Crystal Walker, a Christian evangelist preacher, whose 28-year old son Edward was shot dead in Ohio in 1995 and whose killer has never been brought to justice.

Now a leading voice in Journey Of Hope an organisation founded in the 1993 by the families of other murder victims, Rev Walker admitted in interview with the Byline Times Podcast that, when Eddie was killed, it tested her religious faith. “I said ‘good’,” she recalls, upon hearing that another young man had been killed in retaliation, But, she quickly recognised, “‘good’ was not me,” and she attended a prayer vigil for the other victim, having realised that “I never wanted another mother or sibling or grandparent to feel what I was feeling. That family suffers as well.” She admits to sinking into a “deep funk” of depression lasting five years which challenged her religious faith, and “in order to get out of my funk, I thought about someone else and what they would be going through.”

Rev Walker doesn’t romanticise her son’s life, acknowledging that “he did have his issues”, and was a drug dealer. But he was also “an avid basketball player, a mechanic, and just a funny, hard-headed guy all around.” He was survived by a daughter, who was just two weeks short of her second birthday when he was killed.

It was an experience that Walker admits, “actually tested my view of the death penalty, because I was always against the death penalty since [I was] a teenager,” but over time, her opposition to it has strengthened, leading to speaking tours with Journey of Hope across the US and beyond.

“We've gone to consulates. We've gone to churches. We've gone to education facilities all over, just to talk about our stories and the impact that the death penalty has on everyone, “ she says. “You can't blame someone for being upset – fiercely upset – when something happens in their families, but in order to get healing, I – like the other members of Journey of Hope – have to be released from the violent part.”

Their message seems to have found a receptive audience, with 11 American states having abolished the death penalty in the last 20 years; but although support for execution has waned to its lowest level for 50 years, last year’s national tally of 47 executions was the highest since 2009, with some governors – notably Ron DeSantis in Florida – showing record-breaking enthusiasm for the practice.

Rev Walker describes the Christa Pike incident, in which the Tennessee inmate twice survived attempts to kill her by lethal injection, as “absolutely horrific.” As a prison visitor, Walker has heard accounts from convicts which echo Pike’s own abusive childhood and which have been raised in mitigation for her 1995 murder of classmate Colleen Slemmer. “I’ve heard stories of eight year olds who were given drugs, or two or three year olds who were raped; horrific stories of what goes on in some of these families. It doesn't excuse the crime, but it does give you insight into why these people were not really thinking about what they were doing, or just not connected to what they were doing.”

The political polarisation of the United States means the death penalty is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming mid-terms. In the meantime, previous problems with lethal injections – though rarely as extreme as in the Christa Pike case – have prompted five states to reintroduce death by firing squad. Walker observes, “it’s absolutely incredible that we could even be in this place.”

Pike herself remains in hospital, where her future remains uncertain – along with that of more than 2,000 other people languishing on death row.

There’s an unmistakeable racial dimension to sentencing, with 76% of those executed having killed white people, even though white people account for fewer than half of all murder victims. Racism and sheer incompetence in the US legal system mean that many innocent people are likely to have gone to their deaths.

“There have been so many people that have been removed from the death penalty because their cases were overturned, and a lot of them were African Americans,” Walker said. “I know of one case in Ohio where a young man was placed on death row on the the testimony of a child – this child was pressured by the police, and recanted his testimony in later years, and the [convict] got off death row. One of our Journey of Hope members – her son just got off a prison sentence. He was on death row, then he was commuted from death row, then he was in prison for, I think, 25 years in total – and he was released because it was found that he really had nothing to do with the crime. So there are innocent people who are executed all the time.”

Watch Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Rev Dr Crystal Walker here.