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Leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies are invoking unproven extinction warnings to justify measures that could protect their market position and expand their influence on industry oversight, a Byline Times investigation has found.

A review of industry research found no demonstrated cycle of accelerating, autonomous self-improvement underpinning these warnings. Meanwhile, Byline Times calculations suggest OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s parent Alphabet could face a $10.7 trillion research-computing bill during 2026–2030.

Even generous assumptions about business growth would cover only around a third of that sum, leaving a roughly $7 trillion gap to be met through existing reserves, financing, higher income or lower costs.

Two independent experts with experience developing AI programmes at the United Nations and a top-tier global bank told Byline Times that measures presented as protecting humanity could also shield leading companies from cheaper rivals, and give industry insiders greater influence on potential regulation or oversight mechanisms.

Apocalypse Now?

The current debate over AI was spurred by the resignation of AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, the frontier AI giant behind the chatbot known as Claude. Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – accused both companies of recklessly pursuing AI that can improve itself and become far more capable than humans. He said insiders believe AI could wipe out humanity before this decade ends.

Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger subsequently put the chance of human extinction over the next decade at over 10%; his colleague Samuel Marks warned of human extinction “within a few years”.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, claimed that AI would become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.

He called for US Government support or antitrust exemptions allowing leading companies to coordinate safety standards and limits on development; outside monitors from the nonprofit Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR); and restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. These restrictions would affect a major source of cheaper, openly available AI models.

Anthropic’s call to slow AI development has been supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

Testing the Runaway

AI is already used to help develop better AI systems, or “models”, which are trained by processing data and adjusting how they work. In the runaway scenario, each improved model becomes better at building its successor, accelerating the cycle as humans step back. This is an extreme form of “recursive self-improvement” (RSI).

Daanish Masood, Chief Executive of AI firm CX-1 and former co-lead of the UN’s Innovation Cell, where he helped develop AI programmes for peace efforts, cautioned against treating AI progress as proof of runaway self-improvement.

“The AI risks Dario details are serious enough to justify enforceable safeguards,” he told Byline Times. “I think we need to distinguish what’s been demonstrated from what is being predicted.”

He added:

“AI is already helping to develop AI, but that alone does not establish the runaway, self-sustaining improvement process that is implied by the rhetoric or the term RSI. We also don’t need to declare or pretend that a takeoff has arrived to take the risks seriously.”

AI research company Weco tested a crucial part of this process in July. Its system produced seven improved versions of an AI research programme over eight days without people intervening. Some improvements also helped with tasks beyond those used to develop them.

Although this was a meaningful success, when one of the improved programmes was put in charge of the next round, it ultimately produced results no better than those reached when the original AI ran the process. It seemed to get there faster, but the evidence was too weak to establish a reliable speed advantage. Weco said its system was not close to the runaway acceleration often called an “intelligence explosion”.

In another July experiment, METR gave AI agents up to five days and $10,000 to improve software used to train AI. The software had already been refined to run efficiently. Checks confirmed that the newest AI systems in the test made it roughly 1% to 1.5% faster – equivalent to completing a 100-second job in about 99 seconds. Such small savings are not insignificant – they accumulate into greater efficiency when a programme runs repeatedly – but these figures measure faster software, not a significant increase in intelligence.

Some results are much larger, but still far from the larger claims of autonomous RSI. In an Anthropic experiment, AI agents developed training methods that worked better on the chosen task than those produced by two human researchers. But the agents did not themselves become improved researchers and keep repeating that process. When a promising method was tried in the company’s main AI training process, the apparent improvement was so small that researchers could not tell whether it was a real benefit or just the normal difference between one test run and another.

A Princeton-led study published in August tasked AI agents with producing scientific-grade research papers that would explore the central research questions from two unpublished papers, submitted to a leading machine-learning conference. The original authors assessed the resulting papers and rejected both as unworthy of publication. The agents were capable engineers, conducting experiments, reviewing literature and writing clean code, but struggled with research judgement, creativity and knowing when to change course.

Anthropic’s Own Data

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark admitted just last month that the Princeton study offered a “somewhat bearish signal on short recursive self-improvement timelines…” – contradicting his claims in media interviews on Monday and Tuesday that AI is accelerating out of control.

In an August post on his own newsletter, he went on to explain that the Princeton study suggests “the singularity could be delayed”, because “whether AI systems prove to be capable of creative, paradigm-shifting insights is a big variable on how quickly we might get fully automated AI development.”

“Research papers like this continue to show that there’s a certain absence of valuable, intuitive creativity in today’s AI systems, and though they’re extraordinarily capable engineers, they seem to have a certain property of rote, formulaic thinking that might prevent them from being good researchers”, explained Clark. He further admitted that the study confirmed Anthropic’s own internal data disproving imminent RSI:

“This rhymes with an earlier result from Anthropic where the company tried to automate some aspect of scalable oversight research… and found that to make it successful a human researcher needed to prime some agents with particularly good research directions to pursue, otherwise though they made some progress they failed to explore sufficiently creative ideas to dramatically improve performance.”

Mohammed Marikar, former lead of the global AI programme at Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management and now Director of Institutional Development at decentralised AI training platform FLock.io, said self-improvement does not mean AI will independently pursue humanity’s destruction:

“Self-improving models is quite straightforward from this point provided you can capture the next step – whatever the human is doing with the output, or the response of the natural environment to an action taken – which is definitely feasible. But if there’s an extinction event it will be driven by humans. AI trained on human output is not going to independently reason towards an extinction outcome. It will only do so when driven and forced to do so by humans.”

Marikar called for serious debate about regulation, but said extinction warnings were a distraction:

“This isn’t traditional software where code can be audited, and you can ensure it’s safe. This is a massive neural network whose ‘thinking’ we actually don’t fully understand. It cannot be fully controlled. You can attempt to ‘align’ it with training, but it will be as manipulable as a human will be… All the RSI that exists is based on human input and interaction. Alignment or not, it’s not going to independently reason to an extinction outcome with this training dataset. It will only do so if driven to. The human controller can drive it to a certain outcome even if the RSI attempts to adjust the objective.”

The Human Decisions Behind the Breach

The July attack on Hugging Face, a platform for sharing AI software, is central to Amodei’s warning about rogue AI. METR counted around 700 OpenAI agents taking part: programs designed to work through tasks in several steps. But the incident began with human decisions about their instructions and safeguards.

OpenAI’s own report explains that before the attack, safeguards had been deliberately switched off by human operators to measure what the software could do.

The systems had also been taught to keep trying, while a service for downloading software provided a way around restrictions on internet access. Weeks before the July breach, OpenAI’s security staff identified agents using that same service to communicate and probe computer systems, yet testing continued.

Cambridge University AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio thus argues in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the systems had been pushed by humans to find weaknesses in computer security, including on tasks with no valid solution: “That is not rogue AI, it’s human decision-making”.

METR, the group Amodei recommends as independent auditors on AI safety, produced a report on the Hugging Face incident which illustrated the limits of its own independence. The report acknowledged that OpenAI could remove information not already public, and that METR’s decisions about drafting, editing and redactions were influenced by the goal of ensuring companies it was investigating would remain willing to allow future investigations.

In a separate May assessment, METR disclosed that at least six of its staff and collaborators had close personal relationships with AI-company staff. And while it does not receive cash funding from AI firms, it is dependent on in-kind use of their systems.

Information security specialist Greg Linares called the proposed use of METR as an independent oversight authority “dangerous, deceptive, and morally corrupt”.

The Rising Price of ‘Progress’

The cost of sustaining AI’s recent expansion is more immediate. A Byline Times analysis finds that the projected research-computing bill for 2026–2030 would amount to $10.7 trillion, equal to roughly a tenth of one year’s world economic output.

The calculation draws on Epoch AI’s database of AI systems, updated on 11 September. Comparing selected prominent models released between 2020 and 2025, Byline Times found that the estimated computing used for training grew about 1,200-fold between GPT-3 and GPT-4.5.

Epoch estimates GPT-4.5’s final training run at $389 million in 2023 prices, excluding wider research. Using its 2025 release as the starting point, extending the historical annual cost increase of 3.5 times would put one run at approximately $204 billion by 2030.

The projection assumes conservatively that each company trains one new flagship model annually at this rising cost. Adding 20% for other models and additional training, based on Epoch’s spending estimates, produces a combined five-year bill of approximately $1 trillion for final training alone.

The much larger expense is the research surrounding those runs. Epoch AI’s estimates suggest that final training runs for released models accounted for less than 10% of OpenAI’s research-computing spending in 2024 — approximately $480 million out of $5 billion.

Total research computing therefore costs roughly ten times as much as final training. Applying that ratio produces the projected $10.7 trillion bill. This assumes that all three companies maintain a similar spending pattern and value their computing at comparable rental prices.

Could the companies earn enough to pay for this expansion? Their own forecasts show the strain. OpenAI’s projections reported in February anticipated spending $218 billion more than it generated during 2026–2029. Anthropic has reportedly posted a quarterly operating profit on an adjusted basis, but the research bill projected here is on a different scale.

The Byline Times calculation gives both companies room for substantial growth. It assumes OpenAI reaches its reported annual sales target of $280 billion by 2030, while Anthropic reaches its reported $200 billion target by 2028, then grows another 50% annually.

Allowing for growth towards those targets, total sales during 2026-2030 would reach approximately $550 billion for OpenAI and $960 billion for Anthropic, in 2023 dollars. Each would face an estimated $3.6 trillion research-computing bill. Even spending every dollar of sales on research, leaving nothing for staff or serving customers, would fall far short.

Alphabet has more money to draw on. Byline Times’ calculation starts with the cash generated by its businesses, including money already spent on research so that this expense is not counted twice. Assuming annual growth of 20-30% gives it approximately $1.7-2.3 trillion over five years, before paying for new infrastructure. Its projected research-computing bill is also $3.6 trillion.

Together, the companies would generate approximately $3.2–3.8 trillion under these assumptions, leaving a $6.9–7.5 trillion gap. Closing it would require existing reserves, financing already secured, further investment, higher income or reductions in projected costs.

Cheaper Rivals Keep Pace

Chinese developers including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Z AI offer increasingly capable alternatives that customers can download, adapt and run themselves or through another provider. These models do not necessarily disclose all their training data or methods, but reduce dependence on the original developer and make premium prices harder to justify.

Anthropic’s plan to sell shares on the stock market could put the company’s value at $2 trillion or more. Sustaining such expectations becomes harder if competitors can offer capable alternatives at much lower prices.

Proposed regulations would have the effect of allowing Western companies to coordinate development while holding back a source of cheaper competition.

Jack Clark’s proposed ‘kill switch’, verified by a third party such as METR, could also burden smaller competitors while strengthening industry insiders’ influence over oversight.

“I firmly believe that independent evaluation is worth having,” said Daanish Masood. “My concern is how the rules are written. A safety regime can reduce real risks while favouring the largest labs if its costs and requirements are disproportionate. The rules should track the actual risks, not make size and proximity to government the price of participation in the industry.”

The former UN AI lead said Beijing would see a proposal combining mutual restraint with chip restrictions as an attempt to “lock in a hierarchy” with the US on top. “That makes a broad agreement difficult,” he said. “But crucially, it doesn’t mean narrower safety cooperation is pointless.”

He added that: “The ultimate test of pacing is what happens when a safety finding conflicts with a commercially important deadline. Can independent scrutiny actually change the decision? Without that, pacing risks becoming reputational insurance.”

For leading companies facing high costs and capable rivals, such measures could provide a form of political bailout: protection for their market position and reassurance to investors about their long-term importance. Presenting AI as almost all-powerful can also strengthen the investment case for the companies developing it.

“Basically the competition is resulting in huge training costs and they are burning through cash and having to do increasingly unethical stuff, e.g. all the secret book buying, to get an edge. I think this scaremongering is for commercial reasons to get Formula-1 style regulation to control how competitors can spend”, said Mohammed Marikar.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet did not respond to requests for comment.

Ideological Roots of Doom

Commercial interests do not mean extinction fears are insincere. Those convictions may also have ideological roots.

Philosopher Émile Torres, a former participant in the transhumanist movement, argues that leading AI developers and their most vocal safety critics emerged from overlapping circles of researchers, donors and campaigners with a shared ambition: creating machines powerful enough to transform humanity’s future.

Torres and Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, call these movements ‘TESCREAL’. They include transhumanism’s pursuit of overcoming biological limits and longtermism’s emphasis on vast future populations. The authors trace transhumanism’s origins to eugenics and its pursuit of a supposedly superior machine-merged humanity.

In Torres’s account, Dario Amodei and AI-risk researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky share the ambition of a civilisation transformed by superintelligence and extending beyond earth, despite disagreeing about how safely it can be reached.

This may help explain the unswerving conviction behind extinction warnings, despite a complete failure to scientifically substantiate related probability estimates. If superintelligence is assumed to hold the key to an immense future civilisation, even a speculative threat can become an overriding priority. That urgency follows from the worldview; it does not establish that today’s machines are approaching the capabilities needed to cause human extinction.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times.

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The Warning

There is something deeply strange about the way we talk about artificial intelligence.

We are increasingly being warned that the technology we are rushing to develop could pose an existential threat to humanity. Not by science-fiction, but by the people who actually built these systems.

Engineers and researchers from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have warned that increasingly capable AI could cause catastrophic harm including environmental catastrophe, biological warfare and active war dangers, as well as the possibility of human extinction by 2030. These aren’t predictions we can dismiss as the ravings of technophobes; they reflect a critical debate within the industry about what happens when system capabilities outstrip our ability to contain them.

These systems are no longer merely sophisticated chatbots. AI agents built by humans are now acting autonomously: navigating computers, writing code, accessing sensitive data, and pursuing goals with minimal human supervision. Researchers have already demonstrated systems exploiting software vulnerabilities and behaving in ways their creators did not anticipate. Anthropic has even faced scrutiny over its refusal to submit a recent model for evaluation by the UK’s AI Security Institute. They aren’t required to, so why would they?

None of this proves AI will wipe us out. But if there is even a meaningful possibility of catastrophic harm, the rational response is to assess that risk before accelerating further. Instead, we are building systems faster, granting them more autonomy, and competing to make them more capable all while the people building them admit we may not understand where this ends.

Which leads to an urgent and quite sophisticated question: what the f**k are we doing?

The Race

If we genuinely believe AI could become an existential threat, why are we treating its development as a race?

The world’s most powerful companies are competing to build increasingly capable systems, while governments scramble to ensure their domestic champions don’t fall behind.

The logic is depressingly familiar: if OpenAI slows down, Anthropic moves ahead; if the US hesitates, China takes the lead. Every individual decision is justified in isolation as necessary for competitiveness or responsible development.

And collectively, those decisions produce pure acceleration.

Nobody wants to apply the brakes first. We are repeatedly told AI will transform medicine, boost productivity, and solve intractable problems. Those possibilities might be real, but potential benefits do not make catastrophic risks vanish.

Our current model lets profit-driven companies set their own safety limits. That isn’t a safety system—it’s a commercial free-for-all.

We’ve Seen This Before

There is a reason this all feels vaguely familiar. We have been here before. The closest parallel may be the climate crisis – not because AI and climate change are remotely the same problem (though the former contributes to the latter), but because the political failure is remarkably similar.

For decades, we knew that burning fossil fuels at an enormous scale was changing the climate. Scientists warned governments. Governments commissioned reports. Researchers refined the models. The evidence accumulated. And still, we kept going.

The problem was not simply that politicians didn’t understand the science. It was that acting on the science required confronting some very powerful interests and accepting some very unpopular short-term costs.

Fossil-fuel companies had enormous financial incentives to keep extracting and selling fossil fuels. Industries depended on cheap energy. Politicians worried about jobs, prices and economic growth. Governments competed with one another. Lobbyists worked to weaken regulation. And every individual decision to approve another project, delay another target or water down another policy could be presented as perfectly reasonable.

We could deal with the problem later. Later, unfortunately, is now. We are living with record temperatures, increasingly severe weather, pressure on food and water systems and ecosystems under extraordinary strain. None of this was unforeseeable. The tragedy of climate change is precisely that so much of it was foreseen.

And this is where we should be extremely wary of repeating the same mistake with AI. We are already hearing the warnings. We are already being told that increasingly capable systems could create risks that are difficult to control. And we already have an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars whose commercial success depends on developing those systems as quickly as possible. Why would we expect the political incentives to be any different?

We shouldn’t.

This isn’t about assuming Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, or Elon Musk are inherently evil (though they do have a Bond villain vibe). The problem is structural. Companies are built to compete, grow, and create shareholder value – not to make decisions for humanity as a whole. Even well-intentioned executives – if they exist – face pressure from investors, competitors, and governments.

If restraint looks like unilateral disarmament, dangerous systems become normalised because everyone has a plausible excuse to keep going. We saw this dynamic play out with tobacco, financial markets, opioids, and fossil fuels: private profits are concentrated, while eventual costs are distributed across society. We are remarkably bad at regulating powerful industries before their risks become impossible to ignore. AI gives us a rare luxury: a warning before the consequences arrive.

Getting Serious

Taking the risk seriously doesn’t mean banning AI or halting progress every time a risk is named. The principle is far simpler: if we don’t know whether something is safe, we shouldn’t make it exponentially more powerful just because a competitor might get there first.

Taking the risk seriously means putting genuinely independent safety assessment ahead of commercial competition. The most powerful models must be tested before deployment, dangerous capabilities disclosed, and systems scrutinised by external researchers without relying on corporate goodwill.

Governments must establish binding, universal limits on AI development and they must do it now.

We cannot build public safety around the assumption that private companies will voluntarily sacrifice profits in the name of humanity. We don’t do this with nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, or aviation. We create rules, regulators, and independent oversight – and crucially, we reserve the right to say no.

Inevitability in tech development is not a law of nature; it is a political choice and a marketing frame to force acquiescence. We can decide that certain risks are unacceptable and that the pace of development must be set by what we can safely govern, not what market competition dictates.

The Race To Where, Exactly?

The most uncomfortable truth is that we don’t know where this race ends or why we are running it. AI may well help treat diseases, accelerate discovery, and improve lives. It may also lead to species extinction. Those outcomes are not mutually exclusive but the former don’t really matter if we’re all dead, which is why blindly accelerating toward maximum short-term profit is reckless.

If the goal of technology is human flourishing, then flourishing must be what we optimise for. And if a technology genuinely threatens human survival, then surely survival must be our non-negotiable constraint.

With AI, we have been given an extraordinary chance to intervene before the crisis hits.

We don’t know if the worst-case scenarios will materialise, but if there is even a meaningful chance they will, we must stop asking how fast we can build the future and start asking what kind of future we are actually building.

Watch Kyle Taylor in conversation with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times podcast here.

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Though most football fans don’t need me to tell them this, the World Cup dodged a serious bullet when enough of its members insisted that FIFA abandon its scheme to sell stakes in its major tournaments to private American investors. For sports in America, once a joyous opportunity for young people to get out in the fresh air, get exercise, make friends, learn the values of good sportsmanship and experience the risks and rewards of being on a team, has in recent years become an over-commercialised, over-competitive racket which is increasingly unaffordable for many hopeful participants and fans, crushing the spirits of many young players, and bringing out the worst in pushy or insecure parents.

America’s most popular sports, particularly baseball, American football, ice hockey and basketball, largely take place on a national level. The so-called World Series marking the end of the annual baseball season is famously a competition in which 29 US-based teams, and just one foreign team, the Toronto Blue Jays from Canada, are eligible to play. No foreign teams compete in the games leading up to the annual football championship, the Super Bowl, either, though the National Football League which oversees the sport is trying to expand international viewership by holding some of its games overseas. Only basketball and ice hockey are Olympic Sports, which truly pit American players against the rest of the world, but these only take place every four years.

As a result, for most of the time, American attitudes towards sport are very insular, and mainly focussed on the competitions which take place at the local and state level, rather than national, let alone international. This explains their wonder during the recent World Cup, when they got a chance to see how other countries pursue their sports. Many Americans were bowled over by the fierce national support combined with good-humoured rivalry displayed by most international fans, as exemplified by the bagpipe-playing Scottish Tartan Army; the Norse Viking rowers, and the Wonderwall-singing English fans.

The Norwegian team received a particularly high level of attention, partly because of the rowing of their fans, partly because of the charisma and talent of its star player, Erling Haaland, but also because the team went so far in the tournament despite coming from a relatively small nation. Many sports writers and analysts were struck by the unusual sports culture in Norway, which focuses on enjoyment, inclusion and social development rather than competition between players at younger ages, and only allows kids to take part in more serious play after they have turned 13.

This is in complete contrast to how youth sports is developed in America, where talent scouts are trying to identify the next superstar at ever younger ages. And, like almost everything in this country, private entrepreneurs and businesses have also spotted an ever growing opportunity to make money from Americans’ love of sport. These days, even at the early childhood level, many youth sports have become joyless, ruthless, and exploitative.

‘Field of Dreams’ – At an Unaffordable Cost

Take baseball. There are wonderful nostalgic films about what is often described as America’s National Pastime – harking back to the good ol’ times, when kids gathered in a dusty lot on the edge of town, flipped coins to form sides, and played pick-up games of baseball, sharing whatever equipment they had to hand. The mystical 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, drapes the sport in sepia-coloured nostalgia, telling the story of an Iowa farmer who hears voices in his head telling him to build a baseball field in his cornfield, which then attracts the ghosts of baseball legends to come together to play one last game. The feelgood 1993 movie, The Sandlot, relays the adventures and mishaps in 1960s America of a shy young boy who makes friends with a group of neighbourhood kids through their shared love of baseball.

This is not the baseball of today. Though most towns and communities still have local Little League branches, for kids aged from 5 to 12, where Dads coach teams in generally friendly games, and where the emphasis still remains on participation and fun, growing commercialism has crept in. Increasingly, the kids whose parents can afford to buy them the best equipment or give them private coaching lessons, get played more frequently in the field, while less talented, well-equipped or well-coached kids, sit on the bench. Increasingly, there is competition to get on the “better” teams, and win the end-of-season tournaments.

Healthy competition is to be welcomed. But baseball is progressively straying from this. As early as age 10, the best players get selected to be on what is called an “All-Star” team, to take part in competitions against rival Little Leagues. At age 11, these competitions go up to the state level. At age 12, the best teams from across the nation make it to the LIttle League World Series, where national talent scouts are already on the lookout for the next great baseball star. It’s still mostly fun, but becoming ever more intense.

Also from about age 10, keen players start joining so-called “Travel Teams”. These are teams with professional coaches, who sign up to play in regional competitions and tournaments, often traveling to locations many hours away from home.

As the competition becomes more fierce, so the costs involved go up. There are fees to join the travel teams, and fees to take part in regional tournaments. There are travel costs to faraway tournaments, costs to stay in hotels, and costs to eat out on the road. Some team managers insist that all players and accompanying adults should stay in the same hotel, or take meals together, meaning you are not allowed to seek out a more affordable option if you want to.

Even the most basic equipment – a glove, bat, shoes, helmet and cap – can run to many hundreds of dollars. Naturally, most kids want the branded bats, (think the highly sought after “Nimbus 500” Quidditch flying broom in the Harry Potter books) which can run to over $400 apiece. Each team has to have its own uniforms. Some teams insist you only buy gear from a supplier with whom they have a special commercial arrangement. On top of that, each tournament will have its own rules on which kind of bat, glove or shoe is allowable, meaning parents often have to buy multiple versions of the same thing. Sometimes, the local or national governing baseball body will also decide to change its own guidelines on acceptable gear, necessitating even more purchases.

If you want your kid to get good playing time, you have to be willing to drive out to practices and coaching sessions several times a week, burning up petrol, adding to the wear and tear on your car, and regularly clogging suburban roads, as hassled parents struggle through the traffic. The coaching is usually private, and usually involves additional fees.

Pressured by Apps, Ads and Parental Anxiety

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter, if your kid didn’t mind getting only occasional play time, and was happy to be part of the team for fun. But, the system is designed to make anxious parents feel guilty if their kid is not getting the same opportunities as everyone else, and to make the kids themselves feel awful, if they don’t play well, and are accused of letting the whole team down. Many parents also nurture the dream that their child will be “The One”, who wins a scholarship to college, and makes it to the big leagues. The exorbitant cost of college in America adds to the pressure on parents and kids to chase this kind of success, even though privately most know the odds are against them.

I’m under no illusion about the chances of my own child becoming a baseball superstar. But, hardly a week goes by without me receiving some importuning message from a baseball company or individual, claiming to be a scout who can put my son on the path towards a college scholarship. I don’t know if he is unlucky, or fortunate, that as someone who did not grow up playing baseball, I simply don’t know which offers are serious, and which ones are scams, so just ignore them all.

The most pernicious way in which both these ambitions and insecurities are fostered is through an app designed by the sports retailing behemoth, Dicks Sporting Goods, called GameChanger. This truly remarkable app allows you to follow all your team’s games live, with video footage, and updates of the score in real time. You get to see your own kid go up to bat; you get to see who made the hit, and who struck out; you get to see who made the brilliant catch, and who dropped the ball. So you know exactly how well or how badly your kid is doing. Even worse, the app accumulates his or her statistics over the season, and allows you to compare it with others on the team. My own son has such statistics on his own performance in every single game going back to when he was aged just 10.

Unfortunately, the app is extremely addictive. After every game, most parents pore over their own kid’s record and inevitably are tempted to compare it with others. The most pushy ones can use the statistics to complain to the coaches, if they think their child should get more playing time because they’re playing well, or to whinge privately, if they believe the coach is giving too much playing time to weaker players. In most cases, the players themselves can also access the statistics and compare themselves with others, fuelling their insecurity, or making them over-confident.

Baseball used to be played only in the spring, with kids taking a break over the summer, and playing other sports in the fall and winter. Now, if your kid wants to preserve their place on a good team, they are expected to keep playing from March to November, and continue training over the winter with private coaches. There is almost no time for other sports, or for tired arms to rest and recover. This has led to a shocking 400% increase in the past two decades in teen baseball pitchers requiring surgery on their elbows as a result of being required to throw the ball too hard, too often, before they are fully developed. The surgery is usually successful, but can run to tens of thousands of dollars.

Unhealthy Competition vs Nostalgia for Innocence

It wasn’t always thus. My American friends all wistfully recall a more innocent time, when they played a variety of sports for fun, and everyone, even the weaker players, got their “turn” on the team.

The curse of increasingly unhealthy competition at youth levels is now occurring in almost every sport. I regularly hear from unhappy friends whose child was left in tears, because they were deemed not good enough to take part in an event, or to be on the team, or who were simply neglected by coaches, even those being paid by the parents, because the coaches simply preferred to focus on the more talented players.

The pressure to perform at high level becomes almost unbearable by high school, where pushy parents or ambitious kids become obsessed with making the team. American High School football games have taken on an almost professional veneer, with commercial sponsorship of facilities and equipment, camera recordings on the sidelines, marching bands, cheerleaders and half-time shows.

At college level, athletes, who are supposed to be playing as amateurs, are now eligible to be paid for their services, leading to an absurd situation where some gifted players are now choosing to stay on an extra year or two at university, because they can get paid more at that level, than they would if they accepted a place as a second or third string player on a professional team.

Across the board, the desire to wring as much money as possible out of every sporting event in America is making most games both more expensive and less enjoyable to watch. More games are squeezed into already tight schedules, putting more demands on the players and increasing the risk of injury. For fans, every seat is more expensive. Food and drinks at venues are more expensive. Games go on too long, play is sometimes delayed, or artificial breaks are introduced (as at the World Cup) so that more commercials can be played.

At the US Open this month, banks of seats were left empty as scalpers were allowed to buy up the cheap tickets, and over-price them for real fans. More seats this year were reserved for corporate entertainment, whose attendees were more interested in socialising with each other or posting influencer videos, than actually watching the tennis. Daily play was also divided into two sessions – a daytime and a night-time one – requiring separate tickets, so that more tickets could be sold. The desire to have more games running at peak TV time in the evening also resulted in some games starting so late or running on so long that fans were unable to stay awake long enough to watch them. The best match of the tournament so far, a brilliant five-setter between the defending champion and number two seed, Carlos Alcaraz, and the rising American star, Ben Shelton, was missed by thousands of tennis fans because it didn’t start till after 11pm and only ended at 3.30 am the next morning.

In 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex – an over-close relationship between the military and defense contractors which risked creating undue influence over Government decisions and undermining democracy. Today, if the US wants to retain its status as a top sporting nation, or, even more importantly, if it cares about the mental and physical well-being of its youth, it should also heed the dangers of its burgeoning Sports-Industrial Complex. It could learn a lot from the Norwegian model.

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Jason Arday, Cambridge University’s Professor of Sociology of Education, resigned in August after the institution announced it would investigate his appointment and work – following intense media scrutiny around allegations that parts of his 2015 PhD thesis had been plagiarised.

After stepping down, hundreds of articles were published on Arday – scrutinising many aspects of his life beyond academia, including his charity fundraising and his childhood mutism – across the established press in the UK and internationally. The 41-year-old was found dead at his home days later on 14 August.

One of the key articles which raised questions about the credibility of Arday’s work beyond his PhD – ‘Jason Arday: Times Analysis Finds “Impossible” Data in His Work’ by Emma Yeomans – was published by The Times on 5 August.

Cambridge University announced its investigation into Arday later that day. In a separate report on Arday’s subsequent resignation on that same day, The Times wrote that the institution’s investigation “came after The Times submitted fresh evidence to the university suggesting that large parts of his research were fabricated and­ contained ‘impossible’ evidence”. ­

The characterisation of Arday as a possible serial plagiarist was repeated by reporting in the Guardian and Washington Post. After his death, The Atlantic claimed that a “preponderance of evidence” showed that he was a “serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist” who had “conned” British academia.

The central claim in The Times article was built largely around a paper published by Arday in 2018 that had already been formally investigated by its publisher, MDPI. The Times reported that Arday had been “forced to retract and republish” it.

But a MDPI spokesperson told Byline Times that its investigation did not establish plagiarism or data fabrication in the paper or result in a retraction, finding that the article’s scientific conclusions were unaffected. It did identify problems with citations and the handling of interview data, which required corrections. These correctable errors did not invalidate the study.

The Times did not report this.

It explored the findings of its own “audit of five years of study” conducted by Arday. In addition to the 2018 paper, four other related studies by Arday were reported as possible evidence of fabrication and plagiarism.

It did not mention that one of these, a 2020 paper by Arday, had already undergone a similar formal investigation by another scientific publisher, Taylor & Francis, again resulting in a correction of errors with no finding of plagiarism or data fabrication.

In his career, Jason Arday authored 33 peer-reviewed papers and was one of the most cited scholars in his field.

While media organisations choosing one ‘angle’ over another to pursue in a story is not in any way uncommon – indeed, it is often the norm – the case of The Times is an important one to examine, considering the extent to which the narrative around Jason Arday being a serial plagiarist took hold in the media firestorm that followed, culminating in his death.

What is striking about The Times article is that it did not seriously examine the reasonable – or at least possible – alternative that problems in the papers it audited had resulted from the same kinds of error as the 2018 paper that had been investigated and cleared of plagiarism.

The academics The Times spoke to said that “the cumulative impact is pretty damning, even if some individual examples might have more innocent explanations in terms of sloppy work or coincidence”; that “the studies seemed to show signs of fabrication… which is far worse than plagiarism”; and “I can’t think of any alternative explanations of this… but maybe I just don’t have a good enough imagination”.

In contrast, Professor Colin Talbot, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, told Byline Times that the evidence offered by The Times against Arday appeared to him to be “extremely thin”, and that the problems in his papers amounted to, in his own analysis, “unintentional… correctable errors, at worst”.

Although The Times acknowledged that a Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) misconduct panel cleared Arday of plagiarism in his PhD, it omitted the finding that citation problems in his PhD were due to “honest and reasonable error”, identifying seriously inadequate supervision as a contributing cause.

While LJMU, as the supervising body, could be viewed as an interested party ‘marking its own homework’ and thus having an eye on its own reputational considerations – it was the institution that awarded Arday with his PhD in the first place – its misconduct panel rules required three trained academic decision-makers, separation from Arday and his programme, advance conflict checks, and a separate presenting officer bearing the burden of proof.

The fact that two separate publishers, MDPI and Taylor & Francis, had also investigated and cleared Arday of plagiarism, makes it reasonable to suggest that the balance of probabilities tipped significantly in the academic’s favour.

While Byline Times cannot – and does not – rule out the possibility of plagiarism in Arday’s work, this publication raises the other possibility that no media outlet reported: that the problems reported by The Times may have been honest errors. It was a possibility considered plausible by many academic observers.

Wherever available evidence allowed for more than one explanation, The Times chose to put forward the version most damaging to Arday. Discrepancies in participant numbering and quotation attribution across the four further papers – similar to errors made in his cleared 2018 paper and therefore potentially explainable due to similar coding and cataloguing issues – became a sensationalist headline about “impossible” data.

The Original Critics

In 2023, retired Plymouth Marjon University academic Professor Dave Harris began questioning Jason Arday about his 2018 paper, ‘Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?’, published in Social Sciences by MDPI.

Harris had identified similarities in Arday’s paper with a 2016 BMJ Open study led by Professor Anjum Memon into perceived barriers to mental health services among black and ethnic minority communities.

Harris, who has a PhD in sociology, is a critic of ‘critical race theory’, the academic field developed in the United States that examines how racial inequality can become embedded in institutions.

On his website, he annotated one of Arday’s articles recommending measures to confront racial inequality in universities with the comment: “What liberal shit.”

By this summer, Harris began promoting the work of Nathan Cofnas, who regurgitated the plagiarism allegations against Arday in a Substack post in July, framing the claims as evidence against ‘diversity, equality, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies and the appointment of black academics.

Cofnas, an advocate of race science and eugenics, describes himself as a ‘race realist’. His role at a Cambridge University college ended in 2024 after he wrote that, in a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.

It was Cofnas’ Substack post that triggered the far-right campaign which saw more than 200 articles written about Jason Arday in the weeks before his death. The page on Harris’ website links directly to Cofnas’ Substack post.

Byline Times has previously reported on the role of a far-right race science network around Cofnas, with ties to tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Cambridge University, in fuelling the media campaign against Arday.

Harris asked Professor Martyn Hammersley, an Open University social research methodologist, to review Arday’s 2018 paper.

Similarly to Harris, Hammersley is a sustained critic of anti-racist and decolonial fields in sociology. His 2024 paper questioned whether theories of knowledge and social science methods could ever be racially unjust, while a 2025 article criticised ethical arguments for “critical”, “activist”, and “engaged” social science aimed at social change.

In a 2023 email to senior Cambridge figures, cited by the website Retraction Watch – a blog and database that reports on the retraction and correction of scientific papers – Hammersley alleged “substantial plagiarism”, while acknowledging that Arday had cited relevant articles. His case was that passages, structures, and quotations were insufficiently attributed where they appeared.

The Times did not report in its article that both academics had originated the plagiarism allegations against Arday or that they held longstanding intellectual disagreements with central premises of Arday’s work on anti-racism, decolonisation, and activist research.

While The Times said that its audit of Arday’s work was a “new analysis” by an anonymous academic, it appears that much of it derived from the Retraction Watch article published on 27 July, citing Harris and Hammersley.

The Times article, which did not refer to that previous article, focused on the same papers and even referred precisely to many of the same citation and data anomalies, down to the same quotations and participant number issues described a week earlier by Retraction Watch. The website, however, is vulnerable to being gamed by anonymous sources.

According to Stephanie Lamy, a teacher at Sciences Po Toulouse, one of France’s most prestigious specialised public universities, Retraction Watch relies not only on academic databases, but also on “social media and tips from readers”.

“This creates a potential selection bias: organised or anonymous actors can repeatedly scrutinise and flag particular academics, making them appear unusually problematic when they may simply be unusually scrutinised [and] its public fields and filters do not appear to show how cases first came to its attention, making such patterns difficult to detect,” she said.

While retractions, corrections, and concerns “do not in themselves establish misconduct or poor scholarship, their accumulation can, however, create suspicion – and potentially make Retraction Watch an unwitting amplifier of an organised campaign,” Lamy told Byline Times.

Similarities and Citations

Among the allegations made by these academics were questions around extensive passages in Jason Arday’s PhD that resembled the earlier doctoral work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a Reader at Brunel University, London.

Arday’s thesis – ‘An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring Among Student Teachers to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research’ – repeatedly cites Zwozdiak-Myers’ work and lists her 2009 Brunel University thesis by title, as well as her subsequent book, in its references – undermining the suggestion that Arday had appropriated another scholar’s work while deliberately concealing its origin.

LJMU convened a misconduct panel to investigate the allegations in February this year.

It concluded that the PhD’s citation problems amounted to “honest and reasonable error”, and that the textual overlap between his work and that of Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with academic standards of the time”.

The panel also accepted that Arday had received seriously inadequate doctoral supervision.

The Times’ article did not state these details, which would have provided a more accurate context. It said only that Arday “denies plagiarism and was cleared by investigators at Liverpool John Moores University” and that his “PhD still stands”.

In terms of his 2018 paper, The Times described serious errors that went beyond attribution issues. Some passages, presented as the words of Arday’s own research participants, bore striking similarities to participant quotations in the Memon study.

One Arday participant was quoted describing clinicians as having the power “with the stroke of a pen” to have a person sectioned or sent for counselling and administer medication. An extremely similar formulation appeared in Memon attributed to a different participant. Another apparent Arday participant’s quotation about distrust of psychiatrists within West Indian communities also closely resembled Memon’s wording.

Yet, Arday’s 2018 paper cited Memon throughout, and stated clearly that its two broad themes were adapted from Memon and colleagues. The Memon study was also fully identified in his references. Neither of these would be expected had the intent been deliberate plagiarism.

What The Times failed to explore is the possibility that plagiarism or data fabrication were not the only reasonable explanations of what it had identified in Jason Arday’s work. This raises questions about the rigour of the journalism and reporting ethics employed by The Times.

A Correction, Not a Retraction

The 2018 Arday paper at the centre of The Times story had already been formally investigated by MDPI, and the errors identified were corrected, with no finding of plagiarism or data fabrication.

However, The Times reported that the publisher had been “forced to retract and republish” the paper “with corrections”. It had not. The Times conflated two fundamentally different things: ‘retraction’ and ‘correction’.

Misrepresentations by The Times, through error or otherwise, were stated on two other occasions in the article: once describing the 2018 paper’s methodology sentences as “corrected by one journal, due to plagiarism from Memon”; and describing their reappearance in four later papers as happening “despite him retracting them once”.

As with many scientific publishers, MDPI’s policy is to retract papers the findings of which are “unreliable”, where there is “detection of misrepresentation or fraud”, “extensive overlap with previously published content”, “unauthorised use of data and materials”, “copyright infringement”, and “unethical research” among other issues.

Alternatively, if “errors can be rectified without impacting the results or conclusion, a correction is sufficient to address the error”, according to Dr Ioana Craciun, MDPI’s scientific content lead.

MDPI’s record shows that Arday’s 2018 paper was never retracted, but “corrected” on 6 December 2023 and remained in the scholarly record. MDPI’s substantial correction found that the original article had acknowledged adaptation from Memon but had “inadvertently omitted overlap”.

Citations were inserted throughout the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions. Of 31 participant quotations in the original paper, 12 were trimmed or reworded and six were removed entirely. The methodology was also amended, in line with MDPI’s own published guidance on the difference between a correction and a retraction.

Arday’s paper had also repeated Memon’s description of using NVivo and independent coding – claims that were removed when it was corrected, and replaced with a simpler description of recording, transcription, review, and reflection. This did not establish that Arday had invented his interviews or data.

One reasonable explanation was that, while using Memon’s study as a template, he had imported its methodological language and thereby inaccurately described procedures he had not followed.

This would represent a serious failure of research reporting, but not necessarily deliberate data fabrication. Distinguishing between those possibilities would require the original transcripts, coding files, and records.

Asked to clarify the outcome of the review of the 2018 paper, an MDPI spokesperson said: “I can confirm that the article was not retracted; it was corrected.”

The spokesperson added that the purpose of the publisher’s review was “to verify the accuracy, integrity, and validity of the published article to ensure the accuracy of the scientific record. In line with the Committee on Publication Ethics guidance, MDPI’s focus was on evaluating the publication itself, and determining the appropriate editorial action needed to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record”.

The vulnerability of qualitative research to errors due to data-handling is well-established. It involves extensive interviews with groups of participants. That material is transcribed, and then its contents analysed and extracted into new documents or spreadsheets by which key points can be coded and categorised.

In a SAGE methods guide, UCL researcher Jon Swain describes how he “cut and pasted” interview extracts into a separate Word document and stresses that it is “essential to give each interview a number for identification purposes”. Errors can arise when interview material from multiple participants is mishandled when copying, coding, and processing across documents and spreadsheets. Inadequate record-keeping can lead to misattribution or what looks like plagiarism.

UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s national research funding agency, states that qualitative research can fall short for reasons “many of which do not reflect the intent of researchers”. It classifies “mislabelling” as an honest error and “inadequate documentation or record-keeping” as poor research practice that may occur inadvertently – separately from intentional fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.

Oxford University guidance on plagiarism states that “poor working practices can lead to unintentional plagiarism”, with copied wording becoming so familiar that a researcher forgets its origin or becomes “unable to recall” its provenance, while insufficiently careful cutting and pasting can cause quotation marks and citations present in one draft to disappear from the next.

This can lead to confused attribution, recycled wording, and mislabelled material, producing the kind of errors seen in Jason Arday’s 2018 paper and beyond.

Such errors are not acceptable in academic research and reasonably raise questions around the credentials of those occupying leading academic positions. But they are not necessarily the same as fraud, fabrication, or plagiarism.

A Pattern Does Not Establish Its Cause

In addition to the 2018 paper, The Times focused on similar irregularities across four other qualitative studies by Jason Arday.

Participant numbers did not reconcile, and individuals were described inconsistently. The same or near-identical wording appeared in different papers as the testimony of apparently different participants, while material resembling quotations originally published by Memon and colleagues was reused or misattributed inconsistently. Methodological language from the same body of work was also repeated across several papers.

Again, these are clear failures of research practice. But the pattern does not in itself establish its cause.

Poor control of transcripts, coding tables, source material, and successive drafts could result in quotations being mistakenly copied, relabelled, or detached from their origins. Deliberate fabrication is another possibility.

In an interview with The Times as the story was beginning to dominate UK headlines, Arday said: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake; there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” His early writing had “relied heavily on mimicry”, he added, which he connected to how he learned to process and structure information as an autistic researcher.

The concentration of these errors could be consistent with that explanation – in the least, it cannot be definitively dismissed.

Arday’s published output spans other research methods and multi-author projects. The five papers singled out by The Times are clustered around a single methodological strand centred on qualitative interview and focus group research linked to the Memon paper that was so influential on that body of work.

The Times noted that the same problematic sentences found in the 2018 paper formed “the basis for his methodology section in four further papers”. That these may have occurred due to citation and data-handling errors around the same corpus of material related to Memon is a reasonable possibility The Times did not consider.

One of these papers, published in 2020 – co-authored by Arday with two other academics – had also already been formally investigated and corrected in 2024 by its publisher, Taylor & Francis, as follows: “A correction has been made to clarify the relationship between the study presented in this article and a prior study (Arday 2018), that utilised similar methodologies which in turn were based on Memon et al’s (2016) study.”

The publisher’s policy similarly distinguishes between ‘corrections’ and ‘retractions’, clarifying that while a retraction would result from fabricated data, plagiarism, or other misconduct, a correction addresses an “error or omission” where “the scholarly integrity or reliability of the original findings remain intact”.

No finding of plagiarism or data fabrication was issued in relation to the 2020 paper. But The Times suggested it as evidence of both, without reporting it had already been cleared in a previous formal investigation.

Following The Times’ reporting, this paper is now being re-investigated.

‘The Press Effectively Answered Them in Advance’

To support its angle on Jason Arday’s work, The Times used quotations in its article from academics who also hold views that were not disclosed to readers. It is more accurate to state that there is academic disagreement about the serial plagiarism claims against Arday.

Several scholars have publicly stated that they appear to be evidentially weak, including Professor Jason Stanley of the University of Toronto; former Associate Professor of Philosophy at Felician University Irfan Khawaja; and Kehinde Andrews, former Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University.

In contrast to The Times, Byline Times spoke to three senior academics who all independently concluded that Arday’s errors were in citation and data-handling relating to a few papers using qualitative research methods.

Professor Colin Talbot, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and Emeritus Professor of Government at Manchester University, said: “The central issue seems to be the whole affair was successfully framed as a ‘plagiarism row’ when the evidence for plagiarism was extremely thin and only related to one strand of Professor Arday’s work.

“It is also clear most of the so-called plagiarism – which is a deliberate act – is actually unintentional mistakes, and not huge ones at that. Nor are they consistent or widespread across Arday’s body of work. So framing this as about plagiarism is, in my opinion, not sustainable. It’s about correctable errors, at worst.

“Most of the other main accusations were about his non-academic CV and directed at undermining his credibility. I’ve supervised and examined dozens of PhDs and refereed hundreds of articles and books and I have even had my own work plagiarised… There is nothing about this sad story that says to me it was a ‘plagiarism row’. It was certainly something, but not that.”

Eric Goodyer, formerly Professor at De Montfort University with decades of experience in technology data, told Byline Times that Arday had “an excellent mid-career academic record”, pointing to his papers listed on Scopus, the international abstract and citation database. “He has almost 1,200 citations, demonstrating how much his research is valued by his colleagues.”

“Contrary to media speculation, three claims of plagiarism and data fabrication have been formally investigated, one relates to his PhD and the others to papers published in 2018 and 2020,” Goodyer told Byline Times. “All claims have been rejected; not least because the sources he used were included in his list of references and cited throughout the texts.

“There have been no formal allegations of plagiarism made about his numerous other published works or against any of his many co-authors. There are issues with the management of some of his data, which may be due to his disability… Arday has 33 peer-reviewed papers, the majority co-authored. Why is it that he alone was singled out for manufactured accusations of plagiarism but none of his co-authors?”

A senior sociology professor working in race and criminal justice at a major British university, who only spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “The central point is quite straightforward: a formal process and two publisher reviews looked at the allegations against him, and none found plagiarism or fabrication. The questions raised about the later papers are serious and legitimate. But they are also the kind of questions that only a proper investigation, with access to transcripts and coding records, can answer.

“The press effectively answered them in advance. That is the real failure here, and it does not require anyone simply to take the work on trust.”

A number of academics Byline Times spoke to, especially those of colour, expressed fears of being subjected to unwarranted scrutiny by mainstream media organisations and therefore do not wish to speak out.

The Times, its publisher News UK, and Emma Yeomans did not respond to requests for comment.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

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“This isn't a protest vote anymore. Five or six years ago, the majority of AFD voters still said ‘I vote for them despite their positions’. Now the majority of AFD voters vote for them because of their positions.”

German-born University of Edinburgh academic Dr Jan Eichhorn is reflecting on the growing success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party which secured an unprecedented 43% of the vote at last week’s local elections in his home state of Saxony-Anhalt. AfD, which is already the main opposition in the national parliament – the Bundestag – now hopes to govern an entire region for the first time. But what underlies their burgeoning success in a nation still psychologically scarred by the rise of the Nazis and the experience of World War Two?

Dr Eichhorn, a political scientist who has polled voters in Saxony-Anhalt, has been sharing his insights with the Byline Times Podcast and says that the AfD (like Reform in the UK and the MAGA movement in the United States) has been successful at diverting the blame for economic grievances towards migrants rather than billionaires and a system that encourages inequality.

“We see that yes, anti-immigration sentiment has increased, but most people, including in Saxony-Anhalt, don’t think migration is the number one problem. The number one problem for them has to do with real, material changes – the changes in their communities, the lack of public services, all these things come through,” says Eichhorn. But voters are then (mis)led by the AfD into “scapegoating” recent arrivals – “whose fault it isn’t” – for these broader and more complex societal problems.

Rather than challenging the AfD’s narrative, he argues that mainstream politicians have made the problem worse, by appearing to endorse the party’s anti-migrant stance – much as Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government echoed Reform’s language over asylum seekers. Eichhorn points an accusing finger at Germany’s former Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “There was a famous moment where Scholz said ‘we are going to remove en masse people who aren’t allowed to stay in the country.’ None of that benefited Social Democrats or [their mainstream rivals] the Christian Democrats. The only ones who benefited, like everywhere else, was the AfD, because it normalised that discourse. It increased the salience of migration far beyond where most people had it.”

One of the AfD’s most successful tactics has been to animate a sense of nostalgia for a mythical bygone era of greater prosperity and low crime. In the UK, the far-right has ramped up the fear of rising violence in similar fashion, even though official statistics show a falling crime rate. Eichhorn says “what’s really essential here is that the AfD benefits from tapping into the sense of decline, the sense of deterioration, even in places that are doing economically well, and even amongst people who personally say ‘my household finances are great’. That overarching sense of deterioration is something that that they have been able to mobilise around.”

For all the parallels between the AfD, Reform and Trump’s Republican Party, there is also a specifically German dimension to the party’s success in areas like Saxony-Anhalt. The tumult resulting from the reunification of the country in 1990, following the dissolution of the DDR (East Germany), meant that many of the old certainties disappeared, along with the safe, state-funded jobs on which millions relied for their income.

Eichhorn observes that “although we also have West German [areas] that have gone through massive deindustrialization, they didn't, on top of this, have to go through a massive change of political and societal system as well. It's no surprise that the age group most likely to vote for the AfD are middle-aged people. It's actually quite different to the age structure in Britain, where we see that the older you get, the more likely you are to vote for the far right. In Germany, it's the middle-aged group that is most likely to do this, and in particular, middle-aged men in East Germany. That disruption of the 1990s resonates. There was a period of unemployment above 20% – that's the time when I grew up in in Saxony. We were the worst state in Germany with 21-22% unemployment. Employment figures are better now. We're at about 8% unemployment, still above the national average, but it's not as dramatic. But what it has created is a sense, overall, of disempowerment.”

It’s also clear that the discomfort previous generations felt at supporting a far-right party has now disappeared. The AfD is officially classed as ‘confirmed right wing extremist’ by the nation’s intelligence service; it is ethno-nationalist, anti-Muslim, Euro-sceptic and pro-Russian.

Yet despite (or perhaps, because of) that, it is evidently growing in popularity, at least in some areas. Eichhorn suggests that while the party may tweak their policy to appeal to voters in different regions at different moments, we should be in now doubt as to their underlying ideology. “Their positions are really extreme. They even talk about removing people who have German citizenship from the country if they don't fit, if they're not ‘really German’. Obviously they're trying to downplay some of those more extreme positions at the moment, but a lot of them have neo-Nazi backgrounds. There's nothing hidden here. This party is that extreme in their views.”

Watch or listen to the latest episode of the Byline Times podcast here.

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“One of the most terrifying things,” Viacheslav Levytskyi tells me, “is seeing my city erased by black clouds rising from a missile or drone strike.” His office has panoramic views over Kyiv so he will often see the impact of a Russian attack. Viacheslav, who is a poet, translator, literary scholar and member of Ukrainian PEN is one of the Kyiv residents who, sadly, are seeing the destruction of their homeland not for the first time. Russia is also trying to erase the entirety of Ukrainian literature.

The most recent blow to the Ukrainian publishing industry was on the night of 16 August when a missile struck Kyiv’s historic Pochaina book market destroying thousands of books and the stalls. The strike was the latest in a series targeting Ukrainian publishing and comes in the wake of the murders of Ukrainian authors, such as Victoria Amelina and Volodymyr Vakulenko.

It is not the first time that Russia has tried to destroy all or part of Ukrainian literature.

The mass annihilation of books by missiles and drones is a continuation of four centuries of attacks on the Ukrainian language. Ukrainians have coined a new term, knyhotsyd, which can be translated as bibliocide, the genocide of a nation’s books.

So how do Ukrainian authors deal with the Russian assault on their national literature? How much damage have the strikes done to Ukrainian publishing? Viacheslav is planning to entitle his next book of poems, if he manages to publish it, Insomnia, partly because Russian attacks do not let him, or indeed most Ukrainians, sleep. But also because he feels that now is not the time for sleep. There is too much to do in a country fighting for its survival.

“My working day begins and ends,” he says, “with a walk past the office wall hung with memorial plaques for colleagues who have fallen in the Russian-Ukrainian war. It is painful to see photographs of people with whom I recently worked on a document, or discussed a computer glitch with, or just said hello to in the corridor. It’s even more painful to see a fresh obituary in the hallway...”

The staff are also affected, with “quite a few living in an area that is hit frequently”. However, the commute itself is an act of resistance by authors and indeed every inhabitant of Kyiv. Viacheslav told me that “neither the ruins on the walk to the tube station nor the pavilion at the station entrance, which is propped up on plywood sheets, deter any of us. The city lives. There is shattered glass from blasts on the streets, but cafés remain open, literary events are well attended and theatres open, with performers drumming up support for the units their colleagues and friends serve in.”

But the damage to publishing has been immense. On 1 August 2026, a strike destroyed one of Ukraine’s largest book distribution hubs, the RNK-Ranok warehouse in Kharkiv. Publishing houses across the country were affected. This single strike destroyed 400,000 books with losses amounting to approximately £16.4 million. This vast strike was not an isolated instance, according to Oksana Khmelovska of the Chytomo publishing project, 9.5 million Ukrainian books were destroyed by Russian strikes in the first seven months of 2026. This, according to Khmelovska equals a third of the total volume of books produced in Ukraine in 2025.

The publication of the book which Viacheslav edited and co-authored on the subject of Lviv in Ukrainian literature has been delayed due to the losses suffered by his publisher and damage to the infrastructure. He is convinced this is part of a long-term strategy. The Knyholend (Land of Books) bookshop chain in Kharkiv was also attacked on 1 August and in combination with the attack on RNK-Ranok, Russia destroyed 600,000 school textbooks.

“The aggressor state,” Viacheslav says, “obviously wants to ruin the start of the school year in Ukraine. The word ‘denazification’ which Russia uses to justify its invasion is not some malevolent abstraction. It signifies a world where there is no Ukrainian school, where a Ukrainian child cannot study Ukrainian history, borrow a Ukrainian language textbook from the library or laugh at Ukrainian language memes during a break – such a person will be easier to manipulate against Ukraine and Europe. Every ballistic missile that Ukraine has nothing to shoot down with now, and every cheap Russian drone, brings the Russian dream of destroying the ‘memory cards’ of Ukrainians closer.”

Viacheslav considers the parallel with the “era of the Executed Renaissance” – the term refers to a generation of Ukrainian writers destroyed in the 1930s – to be apt, “it is a comparison I use in my lectures and publications. The sense that history is a wheel returning to that point again will not abandon me.”

But he stresses that the current generation of authors creating the new renaissance are out on the frontline, defending their country with weapons. Indeed, I translated two such soldier poets Maksym Kryvtsov and Artem Dovhopolyi for Index on Censorship. However, many are being killed by the occupiers; the same article featured a poem by Volodymyr Vakulenko who was murdered by the occupying Russians in Kharkiv. I was in contact with Victoria Amelina, who died as the result of a missile strike before she could write a blog for the ‘Stanzas for Ukraine’ series at The Poetry School, although the poems she sent were published with her obituary. Russians are murdering Ukrainian authors and destroying Ukrainian books as they have done many times in the past.

Despite this mass destruction of books which recalls Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, Viacheslav remains optimistic and stresses that we are not hopeless spectators. “The Ranok site has information about how to help the publishers who have suffered from this Russian bibliocide.”

Stephen Komarnyckyj is a British Ukrainian poet and translator whose latest collection of original poetry Singing Carols for James Mason is available from Caparison Press.

The Lviv Book Forum runs from 9-13 September. Live events will be streamed online in partnership with Hay Festival Global and the Ukrainian Institute London with the support of the British Council.

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Britain’s motor industry is facing an existential crisis according to industry expert Professor David Bailey, responding to news that Jaguar Land Rover is shedding 4,000 jobs at its Head Office in Coventry. In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast he said that maintaining a UK presence in the sector was “a question of political will,” and that “we ignore it at our peril”, whilst arguing that the Government needs to set out a long-term strategy to protect this key element of our industrial base.

“Cars are still hugely important in terms of providing high quality jobs that pay an above average wage,” Bailey said. “It accounts for a lot of the research and development that takes place in the UK, and it accounts for a big chunk of our exports as well. It’s also a sector where productivity has advanced very quickly in recent years. We hear Andy Burnham talking about the need to reindustrialise. I think that’s going to be very, very difficult, but I don’t want to see any further deindustrialisation. We really need to hang on to what we’ve got because when it’s gone, it’s really gone.”

Britain has faced a significant decline in car production in the 21st century, commencing with the closure of MG Rover in Birmingham in 2005. That was followed followed by the demise of Ford’s engine plant in Bridgend in 2020, Honda’s factory in Swindon in 2021 and, last year, Vauxhall in Luton. Despite these setbacks, volume car making is still a major part of the economy, thanks largely to JLR who operate in the West Midlands and Liverpool, Nissan in Sunderland, and BMW who produce the Mini in Oxford. JLR currently employs 34,000 people directly in the UK, but supports as many as 200,000 other jobs.

When Professor Bailey and his colleagues at Birmingham Business School tracked workers made redundant following the closure of MG Rover, they found, “people going into much more precarious forms of work. They were in and out of many jobs. They might have had 12,15, 20 jobs since MG Rover closed, and on average, much lower wages. So the secure, unionised, well-paid jobs disappeared, and they became part of this precariat of people in and out of work and in a much more stressful position, because they didn’t know how long they would have their work for. So that's the danger of losing your manufacturing base.”

That said, the motor industry faces significant challenges, including the emergence of Chinese imports, US import tariffs, and – in JLR’s case – a cyber attack last year which halted production for five weeks. Bailey also points to the UK’s uncompetitive energy costs, and the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) target, which aims to phase out the sale of cars powered by the internal combustion engine by 2035. Bailey, who has driven an electric car himself since 2014, warns with all the other pressures bearing down on manufacturers, the ZEV mandate could have the unintended consequence of supporting China’s car makers at the expense of Britain’s.

“You can't just bang the manufacturers on the head with a stick and say ‘this is what you're going to do,’” he said. “The market is made up of supply and demand, and if you can't get demand moving quickly enough, then forcing cars into the market is going to cause all sorts of problems. It means the manufacturers effectively have to subsidise EV sales, so they lose money. There's also the danger that if companies like JLR or Nissan don't hit the targets; they could be fined. Now they may be able to buy credits from pure play [ie: exclusively] electric vehicle makers, but these tend to be Chinese. So the danger there is we end up subsidising Chinese firms, and we cripple our own industry. So the whole policy, frankly, is bonkers, and it needs to be looked at. The Government is consulting on it, but it's a dog's breakfast that was inherited from the last government. That needs to change.”

Watch or listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Professor Bailey on the Byline Times Podcast here.

Ten years ago this month, I spent several weeks working undercover as a domiciliary care worker in Blackpool.

I had gone there while researching a book about low-paid work in Britain and, after answering a few rudimentary questions over the telephone, found it disconcertingly easy to land a job looking after some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

The company was called Carewatch. I had no previous professional experience of social care. I had once helped look after my grandmother’s friend, who had dementia, but otherwise I was a complete novice.

After a short interview, I was invited to attend four days of training, during which we were taught, among other things, how to use a hoist, empty a catheter, administer medication, and what to do if we arrived at somebody’s house and found them lying unconscious on the floor.

There were eight of us when the training began on the Monday. By Friday, two had dropped out.

What struck me most during the weeks that followed was the extraordinary discrepancy between the importance of the work and the conditions under which it was performed.

Care workers form part of the invisible furniture of any civilised society. They are glimpsed darting up garden paths during the working day, identifiable by a flash of uniform before disappearing through somebody’s front door.

Unless you have needed one yourself, or watched a relative become dependent upon them, it is easy to give little thought to what happens once that door closes.

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

A typical visit on my rota was scheduled for 30 minutes. That included the time required to travel from one customer – as we were instructed to call the people in our care – to the next. Once driving time had been deducted, perhaps 20 minutes remained.

In that time, we might have to get somebody out of bed, take them to the toilet, clean them, change an incontinence pad, help them dress, administer their medication, prepare breakfast, and make a cup of tea.

Some visits were shorter still. If one person was unwell, confused, had fallen, or simply required a little more attention than expected, the delay travelled with you for the rest of the day. The only means of recovering the lost time was to take it from somebody else.

I began to understand why some carers developed little tricks for speeding things along.

One colleague described workers asking loaded questions of people who were reluctant to make a fuss: “You don’t need any shopping today, do you?” Or, to somebody who needed changing: “You don’t need your pad doing, do you?”

If the answer was no, 20 minutes might suddenly become 10.

It would be easy to tell this as a story about callous carers. I went into the job half expecting to encounter them. At the time, newspaper exposés of neglect and abuse had made the ‘bad egg’ care worker a familiar figure.

Yet, the longer I spent in the sector, the less adequate that explanation appeared.

Most of the carers I met were decent people doing an extremely difficult job for very little money. The problem was that an employment system built around haste, insecurity, and parsimony had consequences that inevitably travelled downwards until they reached the person sitting in the armchair.

One worker told me she could finish at 11pm and be expected back at seven the following morning. Another held down a second job in a fast-food restaurant and would sometimes leave a late care shift only to begin work there at three in the morning. A male colleague was working about 80 hours a week partly to support his disabled wife.

Travel time was often unpaid or inadequately reimbursed. Zero-hours contracts were widespread. Breaks existed largely on paper.

One experienced carer calculated that, once unpaid gaps and travelling were included, on some days she was in effect earning £4.30 an hour.

None of this remained neatly confined to the employment relationship between a care company and its staff. It shaped the care people received.

That was the thing that stayed with me. I remember elderly people who clearly wanted us to remain for a few minutes once the necessary tasks had been completed. Research at the time suggested that hundreds of thousands of older people could go days without speaking to another person. Sometimes, after we had taken somebody to the toilet, made a drink, and checked their medication, what they really wanted was simply company. You could see the disappointment when we left.

But somewhere else another person was waiting.

A Record of Failure

A decade later, Britain is once again talking about fixing social care.

Andy Burnham has promised to create a National Care Service and has accelerated the commission led by Baroness Louise Casey which is supposed to work out what such a system should eventually look like. Better pay, training, and job security for carers are on the agenda. So too is greater integration between social care and the NHS.

Much of this is welcome.

Some things have improved since I was working in Blackpool. Care workers are better paid in real terms than they were in 2016. The prevalence of zero-hours contracts in domiciliary care has fallen. Staff turnover, while still astonishingly high, has come down.

Yet, much of the system I encountered remains recognisable.

Approximately two in five care workers in non-residential services are still employed on zero-hours contracts. Roughly one job in 10 is vacant. Travel and waiting times are still not invariably paid at a worker’s normal rate. Fifteen-minute care visits, although officially regarded as inappropriate where intimate personal care is required, have not disappeared.

Perhaps most strikingly, the proportion of older people receiving publicly funded long-term care has fallen.

In 2015-16, 587,000 people aged over 65 received it. By 2024-25, the figure was approximately 576,000, despite there being considerably more older people.

The problem, in other words, has not simply been ignored. Governments have spent money, raised wages, and repeatedly legislated around the edges of the system.

But they have never resolved the central question hanging over social care: how much of it do we think people should be entitled to, and who should pay?

This is not a new dilemma.

Indeed, the history of social care reform during the past 30 years resembles one of those Greek punishments in which the protagonist is condemned to repeat the same futile task for eternity.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s Government established a royal commission under Sir Stewart Sutherland to examine long-term care. Its central recommendation was that personal care should be provided free according to need, paid for through taxation. The Government rejected it, principally on cost grounds.

Under Gordon Brown, with Andy Burnham serving as Health Secretary, Labour returned to the idea. Its 2010 plan envisaged a National Care Service and, eventually, comprehensive care, free at the point of use. Various funding mechanisms were discussed, including some form of compulsory contribution. The Conservatives successfully branded one possible estate-based contribution a “death tax”. Labour lost the election.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg then commissioned the economist Andrew Dilnot to find another answer. Dilnot proposed that nobody should face unlimited care costs and recommended a lifetime cap of £35,000. The Coalition Government accepted the principle, albeit with a higher cap of £72,000, and wrote it into law. It was supposed to begin in April 2016. This happened to be the very year I was racing around Blackpool attempting to squeeze care visits into 20-minute windows. By then, the reform had already been postponed.

Theresa May tried again in 2017. Her manifesto proposed allowing people to retain £100,000 of assets while including the value of a person’s home when assessing their ability to pay for care delivered in that home. Payment could be deferred until after death. Labour and others promptly christened the proposal the “dementia tax”. May’s campaign never recovered from the political explosion. She hurriedly promised that there would, after all, be an absolute limit on what anybody would pay, before losing her parliamentary majority.

Then came Boris Johnson. Standing in Downing Street in 2019, he promised to “fix the crisis in social care once and for all”. Two years later, his Government announced an £86,000 lifetime cap on care costs and, unusually, identified a tax with which to pay for its wider health and care programme: a 1.25% rise in National Insurance, later to become a Health and Social Care Levy. Labour opposed the levy, arguing, not unreasonably, that it placed too much of the burden on working people. Then Johnson fell.

Liz Truss abolished the levy.

Rishi Sunak’s Government postponed the care cap.

Labour returned to office in 2024 and cancelled it altogether, arguing that the previous Conservative administration had left the reform unfunded and that abandoning it would save more than £1 billion.

And now here we are again.

Another Labour Government. Another commission. Another National Care Service.

The Politics of Funding

There is a temptation to view this history as evidence that one particular political party has repeatedly betrayed social care. In reality, it tells a more uncomfortable story.

There has been, for decades, something approaching a cross-party consensus about the ends. Politicians of almost every persuasion agree that people should receive dignified care in old age; that families should not face catastrophic and unpredictable bills; that carers deserve better pay; that hospitals should not contain thousands of medically fit patients who cannot be discharged because there is nobody available to look after them at home.

What there has never been is a durable agreement about distributing the cost. Every serious funding proposal creates a constituency with something to lose.

Pay for care through general taxation, and taxpayers must hand over more money. Use National Insurance, and working-age people complain that pensioners have been protected. Draw upon housing wealth, and homeowners fear for the inheritance they intended to leave their children. Require individuals to insure themselves, and those who never require expensive care wonder why they paid. Fund everything from existing departmental budgets, and some other public service has to receive less.

There is no ingenious mechanism that makes the bill disappear.

That has created a peculiar symmetry in British politics: governments edge towards reform, eventually encounter the need to pay for it, and the opposition discovers that denouncing the funding mechanism is electorally easier than proposing one of its own.

The Conservatives did it to Labour with the “death tax”. Labour and others did it to Theresa May with the “dementia tax”. Labour opposed Johnson’s National Insurance rise.

Governments are also not blameless: once safely returned to office, they frequently discover that the expensive reform they previously favoured can be postponed for another few years. The cycle becomes almost predictable.

This is the political trap Andy Burnham must now escape.

The difficulty is becoming more urgent because the underlying demographics have deteriorated. England had approximately 11.5 million people aged 65 and over in 2025. This is projected to rise to roughly 14.5 million by 2040. Skills for Care estimates that simply keeping the care workforce growing in proportion to demand could require another 470,000 posts by then.

At the same time, the UK has spent the past decade undergoing an increasingly angry argument about immigration. There is an obvious tension here which politicians of every party prefer to glide past.

Domiciliary care has become heavily dependent on migrant workers. Roughly a third of the workforce in home care is now made up of people from outside Britain, most of them from outside the European Union.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments for reducing immigration. But a country cannot simultaneously choose significantly lower migration, resist higher taxes, insist on better wages and conditions for care workers, and promise dramatically expanded social care without explaining how those objectives are to be reconciled.

Something has to give.

One answer is to make care considerably more attractive to British workers. But that means paying people more. Paying people more requires providers to receive more. Providers receiving more requires councils, private individuals, or central government to spend more.

Once again, we arrive at the same place: who pays?

The Reality of Providing Good Care

There is another irony.

Social care is often discussed as though it were a drain on the NHS; an ancillary problem which needs solving to free hospital beds. This gets things almost precisely backwards.

Care is not merely a device for keeping elderly people out of hospital – it is something millions of us will require because living longer, while generally desirable, comes with an obvious consequence: more of us survive long enough to become frail, disabled, or dependent on other people.

The work involved is also peculiarly resistant to many of the productivity improvements politicians like to invoke when discussing public services. A robot may one day remind somebody to take a tablet. Artificial intelligence might schedule a rota more efficiently. But there is an irreducibly human quality to helping a frightened elderly person wash, dressing somebody with dementia, or sitting beside a lonely man while he drinks his tea.

The trouble is that time costs money.

That was the scarce commodity when I worked in Blackpool. The clock was everywhere. Four days in which to absorb the basics of caring for vulnerable people. Thirty minutes allocated for a home visit. Ten minutes spent driving there. Twenty minutes remaining inside. A few minutes lost because somebody had fallen. Another few minutes clawed back by rushing somebody else. The great political argument about social care ultimately filtered all the way down to those minutes.

Towards the end of my time at Carewatch, I came to admire many of the people doing the job. They dealt matter-of-factly with things I initially found difficult: bodily fluids, dementia, serious illness, and death. They did work which was intimate, emotionally draining, and occasionally frightening, usually without glamour and often without much respect.

When things went wrong, it was usually the individual carer whose name appeared in the newspaper. What was harder to see was the machinery behind them: the council trying to stretch a budget, the provider bidding for a contract, the rota being filled, the travelling time squeezed, the worker trying to pay for petrol, and the next elderly person waiting for somebody to arrive.

A decade later, Burnham is right that Britain needs another attempt at reform.

But if this attempt is to be different, cross-party consensus will have to mean something more demanding than politicians agreeing that old people deserve dignity. Everybody already agrees with that.

Real consensus would require politicians to acknowledge that good care has a price, and perhaps even to resist the temptation to turn whichever means of paying for it is eventually chosen into an attack line at the next election.

Otherwise, the commission will report, ministers will promise action, somebody will calculate the cost, and the familiar cycle will begin all over again.

And somewhere, while Westminster debates another National Care Service, a care worker will still be looking at the clock, wondering whether there is enough time to sit down and finish that cup of tea.

James Bloodworth is the author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain and Lost Boys: Undercover in the Manosphere

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

I work hard in my writing to not re-deliver the emotional payload of the Trump regime’s AI slop, video content designed to viscerally and politically manipulate its viewers. I don’t believe in reposting the videos or quote-tweeting the content. I use words to describe what it is we are seeing and why we are seeing it, as I did when I was compelled to report on the White House aliens video. This stuff is toxic and dangerous and needs to be handled with care.

As I was pondering the latest deluge of AI videos released by the White House, a new portmanteau popped into my head — Sloptocracy. I define it as “an autocratic regime for whom AI slop is a primary tool of governance.”

The horror, of course, is that it is real.

Trump is using AI slop to paralyze and traumatize the population for political gains. Evidence that he is attempting to turn the US into a Sloptocracy has been available since his first term, when he shared manipulated and edited videos on social media, becoming the first President to earn a ‘manipulated media’ warning label on a tweet.

But over are the days of the occasional video release, often violent and cruel as Trump took aim at perceived political enemies. Now, his administration releases a constant stream of videos created with AI-technology.

This week, Trump’s AI fakes included “footage” of Iran’s Kharg Island oil storage tanks and refineries being bombed, an alarming move during a war; a fake of Trump kicking over a Lake Ontario sign; and an army of armed Trump-wigged ducks.

French historian and author David Colon, who specializes in media history and information manipulation, says the Trump administration uses AI to produce “‘slopaganda’ — low-quality content churned out quickly with the aim of manipulating emotions for political ends.”

Colon told Byline Times: “I’m not sure if its goal is to erode reality the way the Kremlin does. I get the impression that it’s more about creating an alternative reality that aligns with its beliefs and policies.”

That alternative reality also exhausts rational minds, who see it as a way to groom people into a daze so they’re ineffective when real-life threats require urgent action.

Political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Times: “AI-generated imagery is fake. People know it is fake, especially with the fantastical and grotesque output of the Trump regime.”

But he said our normal response mechanisms to these fakes are being altered by Trump’s infinite nihilism.

“Normally, we would expect rational human beings to reject false sensory inputs because they are contrary to the evolutionary imperative: our need to survive,” he explained. “We survive best by understanding primary reality, which is the one world we all share. But in the dystopian world of nihilism projected by Trump and the MAGA cult, AI slop is embraced as an excuse to put aside reason and embrace the negative emotions of hate, resentment and drive for domination. AI slop is directed at the id, not the ego or the superego.”

He said the US’s declining education standards and “culture of anti-intellectualism” has left much of American society unprepared to cope with “the complexity and nuance of the world” compared to other countries.

“Iran is an incredibly rich nation with a history going back to the beginning of human beings living in cities,” he said. “Canada is made up of First Nations, the descendents of French and British settlers, and ‘New Canadians’; it has a political culture that 250 years ago diverged radically from that in the United States.

“But MAGA cultists aren’t prepared to think about any of that. They are comfortable wallowing in the lies of Trump’s AI slop because it reaches them on a visceral level. Large numbers of people get a thrill watching a fake Trump kick over a Lake Ontario sign. They ignore the reality that Trump is a morbidly obese, terminally unfit 80-year-old who could not possibly do such a thing.”

David Colon, who teaches at Sciences Po Paris where he is also a researcher, said he’s less concerned about Trump’s “slopaganda than his systemic attack on epistemic authorities—whether the media, universities, or research institutions.”

Colon cited the example of Trump’s dismantling of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. He said that the act“effectively interrupts the Keeling Curve—and the deactivation of NASA satellites tasked with monitoring the climate risk, depriving us of the very ability to agree on the facts regarding global warming.”

Investigative reporter and author Craig Unger, who has written multiple books on Trump’s ties to Russia, said the inability to come to a collective consensus on facts is all part of strategic attacks on reality to benefit autocratic — or Sloptocratic — goals.

“Trump and the Russians have created a world in which there is no shared reality,” he told Byline Times.

Stop the Slop

After Trump posted the AI fake about bombing Kharg Island, his Vice President JD Vance excused the intended threat by telling reporters that Trump “likes to switch it up on social media a little bit”.

In a Sloptocracy, posting AI fakes during a real war is not switching it up, it’s muddying reality, which in effect serves as an act of war on his own people, as well as the target country.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put out a demand this week that “the Americans stop doing memes,” after the latest round of AI slop targeting Canada.

Clearly, Trump leans on memetic warfare to push his poisonous political agenda but also to push his criminal profiteering.

In a lawsuit filed three weeks ago in New York federal court by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Trump and two of his White House aides, Dan Scavino and Natalie Harp — both of whom help Trump post on social media — are being sued to prevent him from charging up to $100,000 monthly for early access to his Truth Social posts. The lawsuit claims it violates the First Amendment right to the President’s public announcement. But another objective of the lawsuit is to force a federal judge to declare that the act of posting official Government information exclusively on Truth Social is unconstitutional.

With reports that Trump’s much ballyhooed ballroom bunker may also contain a data center along with a drone port, it’s unlikely he’ll stop the slop without some kind of intervention.

“Even if millions of Americans choose to live in the empty, dead-end fantasy of Trump’s AI garbage, that would not be a problem if it didn’t affect anybody else,” Dr Michael MacKay said. “But it is a problem for the whole world because US aggression is now fueled by artificial intelligence enlisted to the cause of evil. The lies of Trump, following from the lies of Putin, are an immediate threat to global peace and security. Free people everywhere must embrace hard reality, challenge the AI-generated fakery, and confront the bullies with every bit of strength, courage and intelligence we have.”

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.

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

HM: Last August, you became the first person of colour to lead Friends of the Earth, as its chief executive, in its more than 50-year history. You’ve had roles at Amnesty International UK and War on Want. Fighting injustice is clearly threaded through your journey. How did your background and upbringing shape you as a political activist?

AR: I was born in Pakistan and my parents came to the UK as economic migrants. They ended up in the north-west of England, where a lot of people from our part of Pakistan, in the Punjab, were originally brought over to work in the factories and mills. We lived in Burnley, which was one of the places that was experiencing rapid deindustrialisation. It was a very white, working-class area, and I was one of the first non-white kids in my primary school. People often ask: how did you get political? And I say: I had no choice, because of the context and reality of racist violence I grew up in.

The National Front used to sell newspapers in my secondary school. Every day, there would be some form of racist abuse, some physical attack. People would pour beer on the Asian women. They would use dogs to terrorise them when their husbands went to work. The house we lived in was firebombed and constantly scrawled with swastikas. And the police weren’t doing anything. In school, it was basically paki-bashing. The break-time bell rang and all the non-white kids would pretty much barricade themselves into one classroom because, if you were down the corridors or in the playground, you would be attacked. Teachers were too scared to do anything.

Racists forced me to learn more about black history because of the stuff they’d say to us. You’d get beaten up, but it would spur me on. What was going on on television screens would play out on the streets and at school. When Roots first aired [in 1977], they’d say to us: ‘say your name is Kunta Kinte’. But then, when in the show [the character’s grandson is] given Chicken George as his slave name, the kids would say to us: ‘say your name is Chicken George’ – and we’d say, ‘no, it’s Kunte Kinte’. Apart from that there was Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – popular, casual racism was on TV screens.

At 14 or 15, I organised a school strike against racist violence – we would go to school but not go in. It was a necessity just to organise. We moved to another area which had slightly more non-white people and an Asian community, because it was safer, but that area was close to the Burnley football ground – so on Saturdays, you’d get football fans come through doing a bit of paki-bashing, smashing a few windows. Every morning, all the kids going to school would get together – we’d put the younger kids in the middle, and then we’d head off – if you went by yourself, or one or two, you’d definitely be attacked. So it was organising without thinking it was organising – just for safety.

Being seven, eight, nine was different, because you felt totally powerless. An example of how random the violence could be … when I was in primary school, I was stood at the bus stop and somebody walked by with a cricket bat and smashed me right in the face. As a kid, you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to go home because my parents will be more worried, I’ll go to school’. We didn’t want to tell our parents too much of what was happening because they then felt even more powerless. But when you got to 12 and 13, and a few more families moved in and they had kids who were 15 or 16, we suddenly became a bit more able to stand up for ourselves.

I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, a youth wing controlled at that time by the Trotskyist Militants, and they were a whole bunch of lefties who were like ‘ooh, a non-white person and lefty who wants to talk about these things’. So I found an outlet. Then one day, an Indian nurse, who had come to my house to see my mum, showed me a [leaflet for the] Asian Youth Movement around the Bradford 12 [a group of young Asian and black men, many of whom were members of the United Black Youth League, who were charged in 1981 with terrorism offences after making petrol bombs to defend against racist attacks. In 1982, they were acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds of lawful self-defence]. So I set up an Asian Youth Movement in Burnley.

That period was super-political. You’d turn on the TV and there was Boys from the Blackstuff, it was Thatcher, three million unemployed, riots on the streets in Brixton and Handsworth, Israel was bombing Beirut, Soweto … It was hard not to be political and draw these threads.

How do you think things have changed? The moment we’re in now feels very alienating for a lot of people. While people of colour might not face the same level of racist attacks in the streets or discrimination that is as overt, at the same time, the story of progress when it comes to racial justice in Britain is complicated.

When I was growing up and you’d talk to people in the Indian Workers’ Association or those kinds of organisations – people who came to the UK in the 1950s and 60s – they told a really horrific story of what it was like, and it was very different. My parents would constantly say ‘it doesn’t matter how long, but one day, they’ll kick us out of their country – like we kicked them out of our country. The only thing they can’t take from you is your education’. It’s the immigrant story, right? Your education is your way out of poverty. We were the first generation who said: we’re not like our parents – we’re not dreaming about going back home, we’re here.

My parents’ generation was deeply religious and had a sense of ‘everyone’s in our community’. Yes, there was all this horrific stuff, but there was also a quiet sense of solidarity among lots of people. I remember during the 1984 miners’ strike, my mum – who didn’t speak English – watched the television and turned to me and said, pointing at Arthur Scargill, ‘he’s a good man, he cares about ordinary people, they’re like us, it’s really bad what’s happening to them. Go and knock on the aunties’ doors and say I said we’ve got to give food for the miners’. So, even people who didn’t have English as a language had a political language. My parents would talk about themselves as being black – asi kaala haan.

I think the biggest change between then and now is that there were far more structures and institutions that allowed you to shape your values and stories – stronger trade unions, community organisations. That has hollowed-out. So people felt more agency. Even though we were being defeated, like in the miners’ strike, you still felt that this was a fight; and you still felt that you could fight and win things. We mobilised. We ran protests. In 1986, I spent my weekends going to Wapping from university to stand on the picket line with striking print workers. The first time I went, there were BNP members there and I was told ‘hey, pakis, we don’t want you’. But, by the end, the far-right had been driven off – and the print workers were saying this was about community and that they now understood what we [the black and Asian community] meant when we spoke about police violence.

So it always felt like there were real moments and bonds of solidarity. And much more of a sense of possibility. Places of community – they were being built and you never felt alone; you always felt like it was a collective experience, not that you were dealing with this in isolation. There was a subtle ‘black person’s nod’, which used to speak so much. We would see each other.

And that collective identity, that shared struggle which people from different minority backgrounds and working-class communities, found together beyond race has also fragmented.

It was deliberately engineered.

When I finished university, I was lucky enough to get a job at the Newham Monitoring Project in east London, an area that was at the heart of radical black institution-building. It came out of the murder in East Ham of Akhtar Ali Baig, who was stabbed to death for a £5 bet on ‘who could kill the first paki’. There were huge protests. On the back of countless other racist murders and incidents – Altab Ali was murdered in Whitechapel – people in the community at that point said: we need something from ourselves. And so the Newham Monitoring Project became this incredible organisation – you could ring up at any point in the day or night and we’d have volunteers come to you. [Formed in 1980, the Project provided legal support, advocacy, and casework, as well as emergency helplines to minority communities dealing with racist violence or state misconduct.] It was building pressure and framing the state as having an obligation to protect us, which it was failing to do – at the same time, police were the instigators of violence against us.

[The establishment] were really fearful of this ‘lair’ of radical black organising. So, where we were fighting for an anti-racist society, they started talking about ‘multiculturalism’ – that we have to live and just be tolerant of each other. But, for us, the most important thing that mattered was the state’s ability to use violence against us and the economic and structural questions. They started saying ‘what we need is Afro-Carribean organisations and Asian organisations and then Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian organisations. And then, if you’re Muslim, Gujarati and Pakistani Muslim centres’ … The community was constantly being fragmented, while we were trying to consciously weave it together to create a positive collective identity. We used to run campaigns together and talk about our common experience: you had to forge blackness politically, it was not a given.

These were identities that were formed through struggle – and they were deconstructed in a very deliberate way.

Extremism always evolves. It seems paradoxical, but also logical, that at the same time that racism moved away from street violence such as the National Front, and conversations about multiculturalism and diversity went national, elements seen as fringe within the far-right 30 years ago have now entered the mainstream – both as a backlash and a continuation of what has always been there under the surface?

I’ve got an old National Front leaflet somewhere with a call for demands – and many of them are now being put forward as mainstream policy.

I remember Jean-Marie Le Pen said [in 2007 after finishing fourth in the French Presidential Election], ‘we have won the battle of ideas: the nation and patriotism, immigration, and insecurity have been put at the heart of this campaign by my adversaries’. In the 1970s and 80s, there was the threat of far-right violence on the streets from the National Front. From the 1990s to the 2000s, it was replaced by the British National Party, which didn’t have quite the same extent but was very violent in key areas such as east and south-east London – it used a ‘rights for whites’ campaign in a 1993 by-election in Tower Hamlets. But, at the same time, the state was saying that we now welcome and celebrate being a multicultural society (they didn’t say we should celebrate being an anti-racist society).

Now, for the first time, we’ve got them not just on the streets, not just in Parliament, but also controlling the public square – in a way that the far-right have never been able to do. I know to some this will sound like an analogy too far, but when people ask ‘is this like the 1970s?’, I say: no, it’s more like the 1930s, where you’ve got a large part of the establishment willing to go along with far-right ideas.

When you see the ideas of displacement, the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, remigration – these [used to be seen as] nutty far-right, and now they are mainstream. You won’t destroy your career if you say these things – you can be on television every other day and say these things; you can have a television station like GB News and radio stations all saying these things, because it’s all valid now. And in that way, fundamentally, the terrain and the landscape is very different now.

I’ve long explored how ‘identity’ is complex and how we all have more ‘multiplicity’ within ourselves even if we don’t think about it like that. But most political and media discussion of identity is reductive and binary, feeding ‘identity politics’ and ‘culture wars’. One example is how those on the hard-right are increasingly making the distinction between ‘Britishness’ as a civic national identity that everyone – including people of colour who have ‘assimilated’ – can have; and ‘Englishness’ as a distinct ethno-nationalist identity that only people with ancestors born here carry.

The past year has also seen ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ putting St George’s and Union flags on display in towns across England – a campaign with ties to far-right networks. Yet, this summer’s World Cup reflected modern England in the way only our national team can do. How do you feel about where we are at with Englishness?

The Englishness debate sits alongside interesting other debates about the nation we’re in. Scottish nationalism, for example, went through a sense of Scotland and Scottishness being an ethnicity to now saying it’s about ‘are you in this place?’ That was a big debate I remember having with the SNP at the time – between the old SNP traditionalists and the new, who said: if your feet are on the soils of Scotland, you are Scottish. We used to remark how interesting it was that you’d get Asians in Scotland in kilts and turbans singing the Scottish anthem in a way that was more inclusive than English nationalism had been.

It’s hard for some generations. It’s hard for me personally because I grew up always being told ‘you are not English, this flag isn’t yours – “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”’. But now, I also see my nephews in England tops, cheering for England, saying: that’s my team – ‘look, this team is full of black and brown people, this is our team’. It is strange, because I have no problem holding the Saltire or the Welsh flag, yet I do have a problem holding the cross of St George because of what it meant to me throughout my life. But I also understand that that’s not now the experience of young black people who see in that flag something different; who see Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham. That’s great.

If someone says to me ‘where are you from?’ I say Burnley – I still have a strong identity with the town even though the experience for me was horrific. But I can live with that. But, if someone says ‘you’re English’, I say: no, I’m not. But I’m also not willing to cede the ground that Englishness is purely about a form of ethnonationalism.

I think what the left or progressives have failed to do is understand how much place matters to people in their identity. We talk often in very universal ways, which is right, but for a lot of people whose lives are within a 40-minute radius of where they were born, and all their friends and family live there and they work there, that’s their world – that is the lens through which they look at absolutely everything. Sometimes, what we talk about doesn’t land with them and the far-right can talk to them about place. And often in a way that’s nostalgic – about what the flag represents, which is contested.

For me, it’s about: how do we capture that moment at the [opening ceremony of the London 2012] Olympics and say: that’s our nationalism? There is so much about solidarity [in our shared history] that is more than the flag. I’m not interested in the flag – I’m interested in the story of who we are, however we have come together.

Race, class, inequality: this is the political lens you have brought to your role leading Friends of the Earth. Why is this intersectional approach to the climate crisis so key – at a time when the right is framing net zero as antithetical to the very real struggles people are dealing with in their everyday lives?

I used to say many years ago that I’m a reluctant environmentalist, right? Because I didn’t come to environmentalism through the environment. I came to it because originally I was very active in the anti-globalisation movement [an international network of organisations fighting for global justice and highlighting the impact of neoliberal policies]. As somebody who had come through radical black and progressive politics, I was an internationalist and suddenly in these spaces I met all these movements from all around the world and they would talk about what was happening to them. For them, the climate crisis was a systemic problem … There was a weaving together [of issues] and the anti-globalisation movement tried very hard to bring together the labour, human rights, and the environment movements, finding commonalities and connections …

We were always thinking intersectional. Our lives are not experienced in this way that the mainstream left or progressives think of as – poverty ‘over here’ and environment ‘over there’. So through that experience, I came across the issue of climate. And I would be like: how is it that this thing which everyone says is potentially going to devastate the world, which is going to unravel everything we’ve ever fought for, [is being talked about] as being for your grandchildren [to deal with]? And they’re talking about it with a polar bear on an iceberg? And they’re talking about it in such ways that it’s about a plastic bag and a fucking plastic straw? To me, it just made no sense at all. Here’s this picture of catastrophe and you’ve totally depoliticised it.

Through that experience, I came across Friends of the Earth, and it’s not like other environmental groups – it talks about environmental justice. We recently released new data which showed people of colour and those on lower incomes are twice as likely to live in neighbourhoods most at risk of flooding, extreme heat, noise pollution, and lack of green space. Twenty years ago, this mapping told the same story – the idea that there are ‘sacrifice people’ and ‘sacrifice zones’. So it’s never simply about what [climate injustice] is doing in the rest of the world, but also what is being done here; that some people’s lives are just not seen as worth it. That was my experience of growing up in Burnley – there were whole groups of people’s lives [where the state said] ‘you don’t count’.

So when I came to work in climate, I said, no: we’ve got to stop talking about carbon and start talking about justice. This is a structural question. It’s not just a matter of temperature levels. We need to ask not just why is it happening, but why can’t [those in power] stop it? Because they are calculating that the people dying of it are the people they think are expendable.

Many years ago, I remember being in a room full of NGOs and government – I couldn’t tell the difference between who was in government and who was in the NGOs – and everybody was white and middle-class and talking in a very similar way. It was all alien to me. I challenged the UK government on its position from a Global South perspective, and somebody apologised to the minister in front of me. I was told ‘the problem is, Asad, you’re not being pragmatic’ – [what they meant was] that I should not ask for what was needed, but was feasibly possible in the politics of what the government was comfortable with. And I said ‘yeah, you know why I’m not being pragmatic? Because I’m not white and middle-class. If you were the ones dying you wouldn’t be pragmatic, you’d be saying “let me tell you the truth”’ … [There was a sense of] ‘don’t push the government too much, let’s recognise what it can do, and then celebrate that as a great win’.

But I said: that’s not enough because you know what is going to happen. The climate justice movement was calling for a global average temperature rise of below 1°C above pre-industrial levels, whereas the mainstream was calling for 2°C – because economists had worked out that the cost of keeping temperatures below 1°C would be too much of a disruption to the economy, whereas with 2°C they could accommodate those costs – as most of that damage would be done in the Global South and not to European and Western economies. They were literally sacrificing lots of people for economic interests. And I would ask: how are you talking about a world where you are accepting this idea that black and brown people in the Global South are expendable?

I’m from Pakistan. Large parts of it are agricultural. Four out of 10 people live in multidimensional poverty. When these extreme weather events happen, they’re not in abstract. In a heatwave, no one escapes to air-conditioning, sits at a fountain, or eats an ice cream – you’re out in the fucking fields and the Pakistan government starts digging mass graves for people because there’s just nothing you can do. I would be struck by this reality; and then this comfortable reality which kept saying to people ‘it’s your plastic bags’. It did not make sense to me. So, our movements were saying that you cannot allow the narratives of climate to be shaped by this kind of lens; we must bring this justice lens into it.

Friends of the Earth – which I’ve worked at before, I previously led its international climate and environmental justice work – was the only brand organisation that sided with the climate justice movement on a slightly more radical position.

Then, after working at [poverty and human rights charity] War On Want for 10 years, and with movements all around the world – whether they were fighting for economic justice, trade unions, farmers, garment workers – the question we would always have was: we can fight, but the decisions are being made in the Global North, so where is the movement in the Global North that is standing with us? How are we weaving this story together? Because our story is of justice and being able to live with dignity; and your story is about carbon tonnes.

If you look at the rise of the right, the fact that they’re weaponising inequality, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-climate [sentiments] … it’s part of the playbook everywhere in the world where the right are growing because they’re weaponising inequality against climate. They’ve put us into their story – we’re the villains in their story; we’re the middle-class, woke literati who are making people’s lives too expensive. And, to some extent, the climate movement is tone deaf if it talks about carbon and doesn’t talk about the fact that people can’t afford energy, or to buy a home or pay rent, when they’re talking about ‘warm homes’ – it just doesn’t connect to where people are.

Even though the UK has been experiencing continuous extreme heat this summer, it still feels as if the climate crisis is ‘far away’ when it comes to public and political perception of its impact and where it is on the people’s list of priorities. How can this human instinct to not look at something because it’s ‘over there’ or at some distance be countered?

The climate science tells us that we have breached the critical 1.5°C guardrail [of global warming above pre-industrial levels]. We are heading towards 2°C in the next 20-25 years. A child born today will live in a world of 3°C. People cannot comprehend what that will mean. Everything that has been predicted to happen in the future is already happening – and it’s landing in an unequal world. Not just between societies, but within societies. Working-class and minority communities are on the frontline.

We’re being told that the climate crisis is something ‘over there’. So, first, we’ve got to tell a very different story, about people, and we have to start with inequality – which means that, when the heatwaves happen, [you’re much worse off temperature-wise] if you live in a council estate in blocks of concrete. If you’re living in an area with high air pollution, it’s the air pollution that’s making heatwaves even worse. If you’re living in areas vulnerable to flooding, for some people, it’s more of a financial problem and they can ask their insurance to take care of it; but for a lot of other people, it’s devastating – they lose everything. Flooding in this country is devastating lots of communities. Now, of course, their experience is very different from the experience of people in Pakistan who are flooded – but there are a lot of commonalities. If you’re poor, you’re experiencing this in a profoundly different way.

But, if you say to people in working-class areas like Burnley, ‘tell me about climate’ – they’ll say ‘yeah, we need to do something about it. Nature? We should have these things. But what matters to me is I can’t pay the bills. What matters to me is the cost of living’. Opinion polls tell us that, if you ask people what is the one thing that is shaping their lives, [the majority of] people will say the cost of living. That forces us as an environmental movement to say: actually, if you want to win, where the right have weaponised inequality against climate action, we have to connect inequality to climate and nature. We have to say it’s not an or, it’s an and.

So, yes, we should have warm homes – but first of all, let’s build affordable homes, let’s put rent caps on homes, let’s put homes in the right places, let’s build homes with nature all around them, and let’s make sure they’re retrofitted. Why aren’t we doing street by street retrofits by local authorities? Why aren’t we planting trees by neighbourhood? Yes, we want energy to be clean, but does it matter if it’s renewable energy if I’m still paying bills where the money goes to the offshore account of a sovereign wealth fund somewhere? Why can’t I own it or my community own it?

The challenge also seems to be about community-building – especially when it comes to tackling the weaponisation of the right, which is pitting different groups and issues against each other?

Something very profound that the climate scientists have said is, yes, you need capital investment in things like seawalls and flood defences, but just as importantly, you need social investment – investment to make communities stronger because, what matters when a crisis happens is whether those communities are resilient enough to withstand it. The social indicators of that are whether you have social protection and social housing, whether you have a health service that works – whether you have these basic things is what determines how crises are experienced by communities. So, no longer can you say that you want to cut emissions, it’s also about how we can adapt to a warming planet and build the resilience of a community given the fact that these things are now a reality.

So, as Friends of the Earth, yes, we should be campaigning for green spaces for every kid. Everyone should have access to green spaces – we saw that during the pandemic; those people who had access to green spaces or had a garden, generally had a far better life than if you were on the 24th floor of a tower block with no access to green space. We know it’s good for your mental health and wellbeing, and that it cools your area. But, if I say this to people who are working three zero-hours contracts and struggling, what matters to them is whether their kid can have a free school meal. So why aren’t we saying: your kid should have green spaces and a free school meal? How are we connecting and rebuilding this sense of community?

Only this way will we be able to stop the rise of the right in our communities because they are using the fact that too many people feel forgotten and left behind. I’m heartbroken when I look at the people going on Tommy Robinson’s marches because I think, 30 years ago, we would have all stood on the same picket lines together. Now, they are angry and marching with these people, and they should be marching with us – because we’re fighting for the same thing. And that’s our failure, not their failure. How are you hard on the politics but soft on the people? How do we connect and think of a new kind of story that puts people in the centre and is about democracy and being proud of the places we live in?

Who tells you the story of who you are and where you came from? The trade unions used to tell you that story, the working men’s club used to tell you that story … there were institutions in a community that told you ‘these are our values’ and ‘we’re the people who did this a hundred years ago’. They gave a sense of who you are in a changing world, and drew from the past to give a shape to the future. But they’re not there any more. And the people who are now telling you a story are in your algorithms saying: remember when you used to have dignity? Remember when people gave a shit about you? That was before, innit? ‘Let’s return to that nostalgic world when being white meant something and you could be proud of being white’. [Going from dignity to whiteness] it’s quite a jump.

We have to say everybody has a right to live with dignity. And we know that, when people don’t feel economic uncertainty, they are generally more accommodating. If people aren’t struggling to pay their energy bills, they can lift their heads up. In Burnley, we’re in a valley with some of the most beautiful landscapes. People say it’s a beautiful, beautiful countryside – and I always say: the problem is, when you’re struggling, you can never lift your head up to look. It’s only when you’re not struggling that your head can begin to lift, and you begin to notice the beauty of nature. People innately want that.

Friends of the Earth has put ‘postcode gardeners’ into working-class communities, into places where people don’t have social capital, or time, or groups of guerilla gardening, planting things out in the street – and it’s been transformative. Not just because people have been able to grow things together, but because people see they can do things together. Our postcode gardeners can bring groups of pensioners, mums, and migrants together to plant something. In that action, they see each other, and then they see something they’ve planted which grows – they can feel that ownership.

We’ve been given a sense of having no agency, that nothing changes, that nobody gives a shit, which has been deliberately engineered. So I think this moment of crisis actually is a profound moment of hope and justice: we can fix the problems, because the answers to the climate crisis are the answers to the inequality crisis; the answers to the inequality crisis are the answers to creating better communities.

Which is why, as Friends of the Earth, we’re committed to building safer, greener communities – putting deep organisers into communities to bring people together around a common agenda. But, at the same time, we need to tell a story about who’s to blame – it’s the billionaires, who say ‘blame your neighbour, don’t blame us’. We have to shift that.

You ask a Reform, Labour, and Green voter about water companies and they all say the same thing: that that’s what is broken about this country – that people can poison your rivers for money. In some senses, they are way more progressive than where our politicians are. How can water be owned by a private company? These are the commons, the things we need to contain for ourselves because we are living on a planet with finite resources, and yet we know we’re over-consuming. The same 1% who have accumulated the world’s wealth are the same 1% whose carbon footprint is as much as two-thirds of the world’s population.

So this forces us into building what I would call ‘the movement of movements’, and a positive vision. If I can’t talk about a positive vision, I can’t fight for it. If I can’t see myself in that vision, why am I going to fight for it? ⏹︎

Hardeep Matharu is Editor in Chief of Byline Times. This interview appears in the current edition of Byline Times magazine

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To set the stage for this article it is important to first debunk a myth. Russia claims that the fact it has removed children from Ukraine is a humanitarian endeavour. In its telling, there is no denial of taking children from Ukraine to Russia. On the contrary, the Russians boast about it. The reason behind this, they say, is to take kids out of harm’s way. There’s a deadly war going on. They are saving those kids from getting hurt or killed, they claim. This is a lie.

The way that Russia wages war is that it destroys from afar the next place it wants to conquer. It doesn’t have ground troops to swoop in and rescue children in these places, it is bombing these urban areas from the air and with drones and with artillery. “Rescuing” kids from danger, the danger Russian forces are responsible for creating, is a physical impossibility.

What Russia has done is to take children from the territories that it invaded in the early stages of the war, when by superior force it captured large cities virtually unscathed and then set about terrorising the local populations who lived there, including by abducting children and sending them to “education camps” in Russia or occupied Crimea.

In reality, these are concentration camps. For children. The echoes of the behaviour of Nazi Germany in WWII do not end there.

To understand the scale of this of not impossible, but it is imprecise. Because there is no access for human rights workers or reporters to the occupied areas. Some figures are available, though.

Ukraine has documented almost 20,000 cases. That means the children and their identities and backgrounds are known. At the same time, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights puts the real figure of somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. We do not even know, therefore, to the nearest hundred thousand, how many children Russia has actually taken from Ukraine.

We do know the number of children Russia itself boasts of. According to the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, 700,000 children have entered Russia from Ukraine since February 2022.

Ms Lvova-Belova is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, charged alongside President Putin at the same time, for war crimes. Specifically for the illegal deportation and transfer of children.

Ukraine’s efforts to get these abducted children returned to their families are painfully slow. One of the leading organisations engaged in this arduous task is called Save Ukraine, founded by Mykola Kuleba, which typically succeeds in repatriating between 15 – 30 children at any one time. These returns are sporadic and sometimes occur weekly, sometimes monthly. In all cases the Russian side obstructs the process. As a result, only about 2,300 children have been returned through their efforts.

In June of 2025, at a rare direct face-to-face dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian officials held in Istanbul, a list of 339 children was handed to the Russia side. These cases, fully documented and indisputable, were presented as a “confidence-building measure” to test Russian commitment to any kind of cooperation. None of these children have been returned to their home country.

What is Happening to These Kids Inside Russia?

One of the cruellest things that can be done to a child is to tell them that they have been abandoned. And yet that is what Russian authorities are directing the centres that hold these children, and the families that adopt them, to do. “Your parents don’t want you. They have given you up. This is your life now” is the message poured into thousands of young minds.

The network of “camps” (not holiday camps, but concentration camps) housing the children that have been taken out of Ukraine stretches across the 11 time zones of Russia, even placing children in the far east of the country making their reunification with loved ones far more difficult from every perspective. According to research undertaken by Yale University there are at least 210 such facilities.

The regime inside these places, where hundreds of children are housed at any one time, is as one would expect inside of a fascist country. These kids are exposed to indoctrination, euphemistically termed “patriotic education” to force them to abandon their actual identity and sense of being Ukrainian.

The aforementioned Maria Lvova-Belova – wanted war criminal – has herself “adopted” a child from Mariupol, a city left in ruins by the initial stage of the full-scale invasion, where tens of thousands of lives were lost.

Ms Lvova-Belova has spoken publicly about how she has treated the child, Pylyp, in order to combat his intense dislike of Russians and his passion for singing Ukrainian songs. Despite her claiming that his mindset was “rewritten” through “intense systemic integration”, that was insufficient to stop him from running away and trying to return to Ukraine through Belarus. He was captured by Russian secret services and has now been enrolled in a Moscow University where he is being prepared for work in the Russian Prosecutor’s Office.

As with all children in Russia, the Ukrainian children are being militarised too. The schools there have long had versions of programmes whereby children were brainwashed to idolise the military and sacrifices for “the motherland”. The current iteration is called the “Young Army”, a movement that replaced the previous “Nashi” (meaning “ours”) programme, which – only a single letter in difference [Note: in the Cyrillic alphabet] from the word “Nazi” – was not too dissimilar in methodology and ideology from the Hitlerjugend of the 1930s.

If you want to understand how Nazism was allowed to take root throughout a society, capturing the minds of the upcoming generation was instrumental. If you want to understand why the total Russian casualty figures (dead and seriously wounded) in Ukraine now stands at almost 1.5 million, the Young Army was established a decade ago, in 2016. “Nashi” was established over a decade earlier, in 2005. The kids who went through these programmes are now of military service age. The Ukrainians now being exposed to this will come of military age. They too, unless this war is stopped, will be forced or coerced into fighting their own country one day.

On top of the hundreds of thousands of children removed from Ukraine and moved to Russia, there are an estimated 1.6 million children living in occupied Ukrainian territories. They too are being forced to learn the Russian school curriculum and all that entails. The propaganda, the lessons in how to use a Kalashnikov automatic weapon, false history, and more.

‘Never again’?

The historical repetition and shared tactics between Nazi Germany and contemporary Russia are not the end of the story. When we refer to the Second World War, we often use the phrase “never again”.

When Germany invaded Poland, they took an estimated 200,000 Polish children with the intent to “Germanise” them. As Russia is doing with the “Russification” of Ukrainian children.

One of the tactics used by the Germans in Poland was to sweep many of these children up from orphanages. This tactic too copied by the Russians today.

According to the Warfare History Network, the goal of the Nazis after taking these children was to “erase any trace of their native heritage and reshape them as loyal Nazis.” This would involve prohibiting the use of their language, with solitary confinement or a beating as a penalty for non-compliance. The children were taught the language of their occupiers and captors. They were forced to adorn military uniforms and regalia, and to sing songs of loyalty to the army and the Reich. While we say never again, all of this is happening right now.

At the end of World War Two, only some 15% of those children were ever returned to their homes and families.

“Never again”?

Paul Niland is an Irish journalist based in Ukraine. He is the founder of the country’s national suicide prevention hotline, Lifeline Ukraine.

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Like many Prime Ministers before him, Andy Burnham is grappling with the fallout from a surging prison population, having been forced into a partial u-turn on plans to release offenders on license after serving just 33% of their sentence. Burnham backtracked after the mother and widow of murdered police officer PC Andrew Harper rallied media support for his killers to be detained for their full 13-year jail term for manslaughter.

Few would blame PC Harper’s family for seeking the maximum penalty possible, but for Jodie Anderson – a former barrister and now a caseworker with Inquest, the charity that represents the families of those who have died in custody – the longer-term political challenge for the new PM is to create a legal system where victims’ understandable desire for justice is balanced by a recognition that for many prisoners, spending time behind bars is a costly and ineffective deterrent.

She told the Byline Times Podcast, “We know that prison exposes people to more harm or more violence; they either die or they come out institutionalised. It's very rarely a happy story of somebody entering the prison system and coming out rehabilitated. That's why we have such high reoffending rates. So the early release scheme has been hugely overinflated in terms of its significance, because it's a very short-term measure. It will alleviate a bit of capacity, but that capacity will be quickly filled. We cannot just build our way out of this prisons crisis; building more prisons doesn't solve the issue of people entering the criminal justice system thick and fast.”

Her argument that “harsh sentences don't act as a deterrent” is supported by the evidence. Re-offending rates for those jailed in Britain are notably higher than in a country such as Norway, which places greater emphasis on rehabilitation. Anderson believes the justice system has been skewed by what she describes as ‘penal populism’, which sees Labour and Conservative politicians attempting to appease right-wing voters by promising more and tougher jail sentences. As a result, the prison population has more than doubled in the space of 30 years, despite the fact that homicide and violent crime have (contrary to the prevailing mainstream media narrative) trended downwards over the last 15 years.

This is not to suggest that serious crime should be ignored, but in Anderson’s view, “the solution is not in building more prisons; it's in prevention and diverting the billions that have been wasted on prison expansion into community services. It costs about £80,000 a year to keep a woman in prison in Bronzefield – imagine what we could do with that money. There’s always a prison space for somebody – but there is very rarely a space in a refuge, there's very rarely a mental health bed for somebody in need. When somebody enters the prison system, it exacerbates the problem. People think that prisons are there to a protect the public, to punish, and to rehabilitate. I would say they're certainly succeeding at punishing people. The conditions are absolutely horrific; stuff you couldn't conjure up in your worst nightmares.”

She points out that while the death penalty was abolished more than 60 years ago in the UK, more than 400 prisoners died in jail last year. Anderson’s cousin Marcus McGuire died by his own hand at HMP Birmingham in 2018 – one of three self-inflicted deaths at the same jail over an 18-month period. Marcus had been hospitalised for a serious act of self-harm just five weeks before his death, but monitoring of his cell for suicide was neverthless withdrawn.

“It pains me to say that this is not an exceptional story,” Anderson says. “The stories of people coming through Inquest’s doors are so similar…[there’s] a culture of indifference.”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Jodie Anderson here.

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The black van speeds along at 130 km/h on a road lined with sunflower fields. Behind the wheel of the ambulance, Andrey, a volunteer with the Relief organization, keeps his eyes fixed on the road. Next to him, Sacha, a former soldier who has since switched to evacuating civilians, scans the sky, phone in hand. A message has just popped up on a military app: a Russian reconnaissance drone has been spotted within a radius of two to five kilometers. “So far, so good,” he says, without taking his eyes off the screen. “The biggest danger comes from the drones we call ‘lookouts,’” Sacha explains. “They can lie in ambush along the roadside. You can’t spot them until they’re right up close and charging at us.”

‘It Doesn’t Matter if it’s an Ambulance or a Military Vehicle.’

For these teams, the danger is very real. On February 4, a team of volunteers was targeted by a fiber-optic drone, followed by artillery fire, this time in the town of Berislav, in the Kherson region. Several civilians were seriously injured during that evacuation. A volunteer police officer filmed the scene with his GoPro camera.

“To the Russians, an ambulance and a military vehicle are one and the same.” Andrey sums up without taking his eyes off the road. “If they see a vehicle, they destroy it,” he continues, gripping the steering wheel nervously as Sacha recalls a previous evacuation, “We heard the sound of the drones. We quickly got out of the car and hid in the bushes,” he says. “We could hear a buzzing sound but the drone didn’t see us. It was frightening,” he says.

This is how the evacuation of the last civilians from the front-line zone has been proceeding for months. Inexpensive and easy to fly, FPV (first-person view) drones are now swarming this 30-kilometer-deep strip along the front line, which residents and soldiers have come to call the “kill zone”.

The ambulance brakes suddenly. Three villagers come out of their homes and get in, helped by the volunteers. “Thank you! Thank you so much, my angels,” exclaims one of village resident. In the back of the armoured vehicle are three civilians who have just left Borova, about 5 km from the front line, located right in the heart of the combat zone. In just a few minutes, they were evacuated from the area, taking with them three meagrely filled shopping bags.

‘Drones Were Flying Around Like Bees’

During the journey to evacuate these civilians to safe areas, Halyna Mykolaïvna, born in 1965, opens up. She clutches her bag tightly. She describes what she left behind. Her house “is still standing for now.” In her neighbourhood, other houses have already been destroyed, and neighbours have died. “It’s very scary,” she says. Looking haggard, she scans the passing landscape, as if to verify that the danger has truly disappeared.

“Drones were constantly flying over the area. They’re destroying everything,” she explains. “They’re striking military vehicles and, above all, civilians.”

“Drones were flying around like bees,” she insists. She pauses before concluding in a whisper, “There was nothing left in the city. We could just hear the explosions all day long.”

Those most reluctant to leave are often the elderly, who have resigned themselves to their fate. That’s where the volunteers step in, with the prior consent of the family members. Through a secure phone line, they receive dozens of calls every day from panicked families, at least one of whose loved ones remains trapped. What follows is a process of locating the person, making contact, and then extracting them under fire in just a few minutes.

Two Hundred People Per Day, Per Transit Centre

All the makeshift routes eventually lead to the same place: a transit centre in Kharkiv, a mandatory stop for evacuees from across the region. In the lobby, families wait on benches, bags piled at their feet.

“We’re currently receiving between 200 and 250 evacuees every day,” explains Serhii, who has been one of the centre’s coordinators for several years. He notes that this is a pace never before seen, and one that continues to rise. He attributes this increase to the intensifying fighting in several districts of the Kharkiv Oblast and the Donbas. The largest number of arrivals today comes from the communities of Kupiansk and Sloviansk, whose residents, too, continue to pour into the city.

Anyone arriving at the centre is eligible for a range of assistance: a stipend of approximately 12,300 hryvnias per person (nearly £200), food and medical kits, and legal assistance. For housing, a digital system called “Poruch” (“next door” in Ukrainian) allows evacuees to book their own accommodations and choose the conditions that suit them. Those who prefer assistance can complete the process on-site, where staff present the available options, process the registration, and then arrange transportation, whether to temporary housing or to a more permanent destination.

The centre operates entirely thanks to volunteers “twenty-four in total” according to Serhii. “Given the current situation, the evacuation zone is expanding, and many people are leaving.” He takes a breath. “I think people will continue to head for safe places, but I can’t see any further than that. We have defence forces holding the line, pushing the enemy back from our territory. But what will happen next… I don’t know,” he says softly. Approximately 100,000 people were evacuated by the Relief Coordination Center.

One Last ‘Thank You’

“The hardest part is when families are permanently trapped and we can’t do anything to help, like in Kostiantynivka or Pokrovsk. We’re doing our best, but we can’t save everyone,” Sacha says. On 18 August, Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration, announced the expansion of the mandatory evacuation zone in the Kharkiv district to include new localities. As fighting draws nearer and the front line continues to advance, the number of civilians forced to leave their homes keeps rising. For those who remain, every day spent in the “kill zone” is under the constant threat of drones and bombardments.

As the morning’s mission draws to a close, Halyna is taken into the care of social services. “Thanks again,” she says to Sacha and Andrey. Her daughter is supposed to come pick her up. Sacha and Andrey wave to her and go to prepare for tomorrow’s mission. This time, it’s in the Sloviansk area.

Paul Mason insists his new book ‘Reds’ is more about guiding the future than simply revisiting the past, despite a subtitle that reads, ‘A Global History of Communism’. In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast, the respected former Newsnight economics editor says he’s become alarmed at the number of young people who are being lured by Marx and Lenin, without fully understanding all that has gone before.

“We see it on the British left and the American left, as critical faculties are being drained away from a young generation, by what we’ve been seeing in academia - the cult of unreason, the cult of identity - people become unable to process simple ideas like ‘killing 16 to 44 million people in a famine is not a great advert for Marxism- Leninism’ - because this is what happened in China. And so we’re now seeing on TikTok, people from Gen Z teaching each other the basics of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought as if all the catastrophes and mass murders never happened.”

It perhaps needs emphasising at this point that Mason is a socialist. He describes himself as having grown up belonging to “the far left of the Labour Party, influenced by Trotskyism”, whilst insisting that he “was never starry-eyed about either the Soviet Union or China.” Indeed, when he visited trade unionist friends in Russia following the collapse of the USSR in 1992, “we wanted to see that Soviet bureaucracy fall.”

At that moment in history it was tempting to think that communism was, if not quite dead, then certainly on the critical list. There were various isolated communist regimes - Cuba and North Korea for example - but after the fall of the Soviet Union, China was the last major flag-bearer for the ideology.

Even then, as Mason recalls, the party in Beijing seemed ready for change.

“In the 2000s, as a BBC correspondent, I was allowed quite extensive access to China. I used to meet very senior Chinese officials, and they’d say quietly, ‘Paul, listen, off camera, we’re not really communist. We’re more like Swedish social democrats. We want to do good for the workers. We want to develop our economy. It’s just we haven’t got a developed economy enough to have a welfare state. When we do, we’ll have one; and we’re experimenting with a few local elections. So the direction of travel is towards a kind of controlled democracy.”

There were even fanciful hopes that China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 might accelerate an era of greater personal freedom in the PRC, but as Mason observes, “Xi Jinping has cancelled all that. Xi has restored orthodox Marxism as the ideology of the state. We have to therefore take seriously the possibility that if China does become the strongest economy in the world, it might still have this ideology, and it will teach 100 million party members and 1.6 billion Chinese citizens that this is communism, and will say that this is a vindication of Marx.”

Suffice to say, Mason - who has “a lot of time for Marx” - feels that China’s authoritarian structure, which rewards party loyalists, is a betrayal of “the sharing impulse” which he regards as “part of human nature” and drives many towards communism, especially at moments of societal breakdown. He notes that Marx (and Lenin) believed that in a society with private property, “class hierarchy and violence disappears - and that’s just wrong. And the fact of it being wrong it takes away an important premise of all the communisms I talk about.”

Asked to identify the origins of communism, he goes much further back than the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas in 1917, Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 or even the French Revolution in 1789; all the way, in fact, to the dawn of man.

“The impulse to share and to collaborate and not hoard private property, I would argue, is genetic for us, and there are strong arguments among evolutionary biologists to say it is that which separated us from the primates we evolved from. Our modes of living had to be [communist] in order to suppress the dominant male, which is the characteristic of all baboon tribes or the gorilla family. We had to evolve sharing. Both the archaeological record and the anthropological record of the surviving tribes show that the classic hunter-gatherer band is communist. It shares; it practices altruism.”

For all that, Mason returns to his concerns for the next generation, which might fail to recognise that, in practice, “the actual evidence is that those egalitarian, altruistic societies also had coercion. They enforced egalitarianism through strict peer pressure and sometimes murder. If someone’s trying to seize property, or seize position in those societies, there is quite a strong pattern among the anthropological record of them being taken down by mockery, by humour, by ostracism, and ultimately by murder if they broke the rules. Now, why is that important? Because if you argue, as I do, that the communist sharing impulse is part of human nature, you also have to then say it doesn’t guarantee the absence of violence, oppression, and coercion.”

Mason says he has consciously turned away from revolutionary thinking as a result of that observation, and describes himself now as “a radical social democrat. I work within the Labour Party. I want to push it towards more socially just outcomes. I want it to acknowledge the legacy of British imperialism. I want it to deal with modern imperialism in Russia against Ukraine. The idea that redemption emerges by knocking things down is something I think is provably wrong, and it’s so risky because the fact is that every revolution in the 20th century brought to power unscrupulous people who were determined to carve out positions for themselves. It was true in Venezuela, true in Nicaragua. Cuba is a travesty, however much we want to defend it against the American blockade.

“I think that capitalism is in trouble [but] the classic Stalinist, Leninist, Maoist answer is not an answer. The only thing we’ve got in Europe is social democracy and its green allies and its reformed communist allies. So, for example, in Spain, you’ve got [second deputy Prime Minister] Yolanda Diaz, an ex-communist, but effectively a social democrat. Let’s cherish that tradition and build something out of it. Be proud of it because our tradition, too, was heroic in the Second World War and against fascism.”

Watch or listen now to Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Paul Mason on the Byline Times Podcast.

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Between 2020 and 2023, drill and rap lyrics were used as evidence against 252 defendants in England and Wales, according to a new report by the BBC. The Metropolitan Police has now defended that practice, arguing that some musicians disclose real information about violent crimes and that, where they do, prosecutors should be entitled to use it.

To some degree, this sounds sensible.

A lyric containing a detail known only to a murderer might have weight in court. A threat followed by an attack may too. But there must be a difference between using a song to establish a fact – a motive, a piece of evidence, an admission of guilt – and using it to establish what sort of person is standing in the dock.

Drill music is deliberately threatening. It details territorial claims and what will happen to rivals. Sometimes it describes genuine violence. Sometimes the threat is real; sometimes it is exaggeration, borrowed reputation or performance.

In musical culture, the lines between reality and bravado are thin indeed.

So the difficulty comes when prosecutors and juries are invited to treat drill music as autobiography.

The campaign group Art Not Evidence is now lobbying the Government to change the law so that there is a presumption against admitting ‘creative expression’ as evidence.

On balance, it is the right call to make.

Last November, Action On Armed Violence (AOAV) – the charity of which I am the executive director – published a report, ‘Does music fuel gun violence? A comparative analysis across five genres and settings’. In it, we examined a number of musical cultures that had repeatedly been accused – by the media, police, and politicians – of driving violence. We considered Chicago drill, Punjabi hip-hop, Rio de Janeiro’s funk proibidão, Lesotho’s famo, and Mexico’s narcocorridos.

Our comparison covered homicide trends, policing, gun availability, criminal markets, and economic conditions. We found, across all five, no evidence that the arrival or popularity of certain types of music preceded measurable increases in gun homicide.

Violence was far better explained by poverty, by access to weapons, by the presence of organised-crime gangs, by political instability, and by weak justice systems.

When it comes to drill music, Chicago is the obvious comparison.

Drill emerged there in the early 2010s. Yet, the city’s homicide rate had peaked in the early 1990s, long before Chief Keef, an American rapper and record producer, ever uploaded a song. Yes, killings surged again in 2016, but they then fell between 2017 and 2019. Drill remained popular throughout.

Researchers instead point to changes in policing, violence-prevention funding, gun seizures, and wider American trends to explain the rise and fall of gun violence there. Music was a constant in a landscape of shifting social spending, police priorities, and gun laws.

Still, when Keef sings in his song ‘Blew My High’, “’cause I’mma shoot when I see my opponent”, it’s like a red rag to a police officer, or a conservative commentator, or a preacher standing on the family values podium.

The urge to blame culture is powerful because it offers a simple explanation. It’s a clear narrative. It assumes that violence and music are interlinked, and that violent music causes violence.

This has led to real-world interventions. In 2015, Chicago authorities even stopped a hologram of Chief Keef appearing at a ‘Stop the Killing’ benefit concert because officials argued that even his virtual appearance posed a public safety risk.

Governments elsewhere have responded similarly. Punjab restricted displays of firearms in songs and videos. Mexican states have restricted narcocorridos. Brazil has arrested funk performers. Lesotho banned famo groups and their songs. And in all of these instances, AOAV found no convincing evidence that such restrictions reduced lethal violence.

That does not prove that music is irrelevant. Yes, songs can intensify rivalries, they can glorify killers, and they can be adverts for a form of gang allegiance. And, yes, they can even contain evidence of crimes. But depicting violence is not the same as causing it, and describing a violent world is not proof that the performer committed the violence described.

It is the second of those assumptions that should concern British courts.

Violent music is vivid. An online video of a masked teenager waving a knife can easily be shown to a jury. But this does not amount to proof of intent.

This points to a less comfortable fact. Lyrics may assume greater evidential importance precisely in cases where conventional evidence is thin.

Some of the crimes most closely associated with drill culture are also among the hardest for police to solve, and the burden of that failure falls disproportionately on young black men.

AOAV’s analysis of London homicides found that black people accounted for approximately 40% of homicide victims between 2019 and 2023, but 73% of victims in unsolved cases. The disparity was even sharper for particular methods of killing: 83.7% of victims in unsolved shootings and 73.5% of victims in unsolved stabbings were black. The average victim in an unsolved case was just 28.

That creates an obvious evidential problem. Shootings accounted for 38% of unsolved murders despite making up only 8.7% of homicides overall, and AOAV found that 59.1% of the unsolved cases it examined had no apparent viable lead.

These are often difficult investigations, involving masked attackers, limited forensic evidence, and witnesses who may be unwilling or unable to come forward. In precisely such cases, where conventional evidence is weakest and the victim is disproportionately likely to be a young black man, lyrics, videos and assertions of gang affiliation may begin to carry more evidential weight than they otherwise would.

As the Art Not Evidence group told the BBC, drill lyrics were being used in court to show “gang aesthetics... taken at face value and misinterpreted” by those with “a lack of knowledge of the culture of the genre”.

For centuries, art has turned violence into spectacle. Freddie Mercury singing in Bohemian Rhapsody that he had just killed a man was not an admission of guilt. Johnny Cash did not really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. David Byrne was not really a Psycho Killer.

Nobody ever mistook these for witness statements.

Drill should not acquire a different evidential status simply because its performers are young, its imagery is disturbing, and the street violence surrounding it is sometimes real.

And, in the end, courts should be wary of allowing creative performance to become something approaching proof.

Iain Overton is the executive director of the Action On Armed Violence charity

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The White House has threatened its foe Iran with a crushing “economic D-Day” in a bid to bring to Tehran to its knees – so what are we make of its imposition of 50% tariffs on Canada, a neighbour and traditional ally?

Siobhán Vipond, Executive Vice President of the Canadian Labour Congress, which speaks for more than 3 million workers, sees a common thread. “We are in an economic war”, she declares in an interview with the Byline Times Podcast. Whilst acknowledging that Canada isn’t under military threat, Vipond believes President Trump’s aim is similar – to force its erstwhile friend into submission and undermine its sovereignty.

“This is an economic attack on Canada,” she asserts. “He wants our soft lumber. He wants our water. He wants our oil and gas. He wants all of these natural resources that we have in Canada, seeing it as a market he can control and buy.” But, Vipond warns, Canadians are willing to make sacrifices to fight back, despite warnings that the tariffs might cost 90,000 jobs. “The only proper response to a bully is to push back, and the only proper response to someone who is trying to have a war with your country, economically or otherwise, is to push back, and find the allies that are going to be there, because this has to be about Canadians, Canadian workers, and our communities.”

The latest round of tariffs was triggered by Canadian PM Mark Carney’s decision to withdraw from negotiations last weekend. He said that US trade officials “asked too much, and they offered too little.” As a result, some $20 billion worth of goods – around 5% of Canada’s exports to the US – now face 50% tariffs encompassing wine, dairy products, clothing, hockey equipment and even cement. Carney has warned of “dollar for dollar” retaliation, and the sale of US liquor brands such as Jack Daniel's has already been banned in many Canadian provinces. ‘Made in Canada’ signs are prominently displayed at grocery stores, and Vipond says that consumers are taking unilateral action by refusing to buy American produce. Tourism, she adds, is also being hit by an unofficial boycott: “Canadians are saying ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it.’ We don’t want them to go out of business, especially smaller B&Bs or campsites, but people just don’t want to travel to the United States.”

As part of the negotiations, US trade negotiators had been seeking to restrict Canada’s freedom to strike trade deals with other nations. “I mean, that’s the definition of an abusive relationship – that ‘we can be your only friend’” observes Vipond. The US also wanted to dilute requirements for its exporters to label goods in French as well as English – a clause which struck at the heart of Canada’s bilingual identity. “Our people in Canada deserve respect, and he wanted to have a say in laws that were made in Canada. That’s not how sovereignty works. That is foreign interference in the most blatant way. There’s no way we could have supported a signing of an agreement like that.”

As a trade unionist, Vipond is well aware of the downsides of globalisation; moving manufacturing offshore can cost jobs as well as reducing workers’ rights and pay. But she warns that the clock can’t simply be turned back, especially when companies have learned to operate efficiently across borders. “People are maybe not aware of how connected we are,” she says. “A car can cross the border a dozen times before it is completed, right? So when you’re pushing back and saying ‘it has to be made in America’ what does that mean? We’re decades into a strong global economy that depends on trade, and so trying to build these walls around our economy and bring everything back home doesn’t seem real. The employers are global employers. How we trade things is global.”

Canada has been developing a series of major transport and energy infrastructure projects to reduce its reliance on the US and further distance itself from the notion that it is the 51st state in all but name. Vipond says: “ We have a lot of natural resources here. We have a lot of really strong industries, and so looking for partners and continuing to grow is the right step. It does mean we have hard times in front of us, and we as the labour movement are looking to make sure that any investments have a positive impact on workers, because the communities affected by any of this should be the ones that are going to get our support.

“The world wants to invest in Canada because we are a fairly stable country, and we have a lot to offer. And so that’s the path we’re going to go down – and that’s going to be good for our members, but it’s going to be good for all workers and communities in Canada.”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Siobhán Vipond here

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It’s a video that will leave some viewers deeply worried. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Britain getting through the next few years without a rise in political violence.”

It goes on: “If a Reform government pushes through its agenda, resistance from those ideologically opposed to that direction could severely undermine national stability.”

If this doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for Nigel Farage’s party, it’s not meant to be, of course. It’s a promotional video to sell gold bullion. Gold-movers often benefit from fears over the state of the economy and the wider nation.

What makes this promotional material different, however, is that the firm’s most high-profile ambassador is none other than Clacton MP Nigel Farage.

The video from Direct Bullion, titled ‘50-Year Crisis Repeating?’, is riddled with grim warnings about the state of British politics. And it puts some of the blame – or perhaps, for the firm, opportunity – at the door of the right-wing party.

Nigel Farage is a brand ambassador for Direct Bullion, and has declared three payments from the company totalling £415,500. £189,300 landed on 5 December 2024, £91,200 on 6 January 2025, and £135,000 on 31 October 2025.

These latest revelations suggest that Farage has been paid more than £400,000 by a company whose marketing appears to treat the political division he is associated with – and the expected disorder that would result if he became Prime Minister – as a commercial opportunity to exploit.

The video asks if “sterling can survive what’s coming.”

Amid a jaunty musical backdrop, it goes on: “Nigel Farage has said that if elected, his government would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights and build migrant detention centres in areas that vote Green. When asked about the possibility of violent protest from left-wing opponents, Farage appeared undeterred.”

The narrator adds: “The risk of political unrest would become far more serious” under Reform’s plans – similar to the “poll tax riots of 1990”.

In the minds of gold-sellers Direct Bullion, the scenario is a reason for viewers to buy physical gold.

The Unanswered Questions

After being alerted to the video, Byline Times put some questions to Farage and Reform UK:

• Does Nigel Farage remain a paid brand ambassador for Direct Bullion, and has he received or been promised any further payments beyond the £415,500 declared?

• Are any of his payments linked to Direct Bullion’s sales or performance?

• Was he aware of the 12 May video before publication, and did he or his representatives see or approve it?

• Why does he accept payment from a firm whose promotional material tells customers that his own party taking power would raise the risk of civil unrest – and does he think that is appropriate for a serving MP and party leader?

• Has he asked Direct Bullion to withdraw or amend the video? If not, why not?

• How does he reconcile more than £400,000 in outside earnings, and the time this role requires, with his duty to give priority to his constituents in Clacton?

• Does Reform UK have any other financial relationship with Direct Bullion or its directors?

We have not received a response.

The December 2024 payment of £189,300 from Direct Bullion to Farage was for a “maximum” of four hours’ work per month, according to the MP. “It also includes payment for work undertaken prior to my election,” he stated in his register of interests.

When £91,200 came in just a few weeks later, on 6 January 2025, Farage said again it was for four hours’ work per month. Then when £135,000 landed in October 2025, Farage stated it was for four hours’ work per month “over the course of a three-month period”. The filings suggest he is paid more than £10,000 an hour by the company.

Labour MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, Phil Brickell MP, told Byline Times: “It should come as no surprise that Farage is taking thousands of pounds from a company trying to cash in on betting against Britain. Once again, it is clear that he is more interested in feathering his own nest than fixing our problems.”

He called on the Reform leader to “distance himself from these doom-mongers and return his ‘earnings’.”

The Bolton West MP is calling for a ban on second jobs for MPs “to restore trust in politics as a force for good”.

Tim Picton, senior advocacy advisor at the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, told this outlet it “beggars belief” that a company would pay an MP hundreds of thousands of pounds and then “seek to leverage the potential future social unrest their leadership of the country would bring in order to sell its product”.

“The big question here is whether it is at all appropriate for individual MPs to be allowed to leverage their public profile to help a company sell its goods.”

He added: “There has been real inertia from ministers and parliament on tackling second jobs and the kinds of serious risks that they bring. The government must now get on with bringing forward legislation that ensures MPs put constituents first and ends the lucrative side hustles”.

The video itself ignores the fact that the 10-year gilt yield – the cost of long-term borrowing for the Government – fluctuates and has risen significantly recently due to the Iran war energy shock. In June, it dipped to around 4.7% and it had been as low as 4.25% in February. There is no widespread expectation among economists of a collapse in Britain’s currency.

The March spike in borrowing costs was driven by the external energy shock and the repricing of Bank of England rate expectations, not Reform’s rise or fears of political violence. Many economies have seen government borrowing costs rise amid the energy crisis.

One story from The Telegraph provides the only real evidence citation in the video.

What the video does not point out is that Reform’s support in the polls has been on a downward trajectory, going from an average of 31% last September to around 26% when it was published. Reform has since dropped further, with Labour now level-pegging around 24%.

Direct Bullion was contacted for comment.

Full Transcript

The following is a full transcript of the video, titled ‘50-Year Crisis Repeating?’, published on 12 May 2026:

“Britain is entering dangerous territory, politically and financially, and your savings could be caught in the fallout unless you prepare properly. The division and unrest affecting British society are far from over, and until those deeper fractures begin to heal, the country still has a long way to go. That also means the economy may have further to fall before it finally reaches the bottom.

“So, we have to seriously consider whether sterling, having already lost most of its value since Britain effectively left the last gold standard, can survive what may still be coming.

“And in that environment, ordinary people are being forced to put themselves back on their own personal gold standard because relying on sterling alone is no longer enough.

“Last week’s [May] local elections showed a major shift toward Reform, alongside smaller gains for the Green Party. Further evidence that two-party politics in Britain is breaking [music] down.

“Reform leader Nigel Farage has said that if elected, his government would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights and build migrant detention centres in areas that vote green.

“When asked about the possibility of violent protest from left-wing opponents, Farage appeared undeterred. If Reform were to win a large enough majority to implement those policies, the risk of political unrest would become far more serious.

“Many will remember the poll tax riots of 1990. And if a Reform government pushes through its agenda, resistance from those ideologically opposed to that direction could severely undermine national stability.

“The problem for us all is that Britain’s finances are already balanced on a knife edge. As reported by The Telegraph, the country could once again be heading toward an International Monetary Fund bailout just 50 years after the last one. And if that happens, it could mean austerity.

“The IMF does not provide financial support without strict economic conditions attached, and austerity imposed from outside the country could trigger widespread political unrest, further damaging Britain’s standing in international markets.

“If 5% yields on 10-year gilt already look alarming from the government’s perspective, then conditions could become far worse before they improve. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Britain getting through the next few years without a rise in political violence.

“The markets will likely not respond well to that, and the economic cost could be severe. In a period of political instability, financial uncertainty, and weakening currencies, physical gold becomes our insurance policy.”

It ends with a call for viewers to subscribe so they can learn about gold and “how you can protect your wealth in these uncertain times.”

Josiah Mortimer is Byline Times’ Chief Reporter. Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

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The death of Jason Arday, the former Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, has provoked considerable debate in the UK and beyond regarding alleged racism in the media, ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion), and academic misconduct more generally.

In July, Nathan Cofnas accused Jason Arday of significant plagiarism in his PhD thesis and in a number of published papers. Within a matter of days, the story had been picked up by the mainstream press and went on to dominate the news cycle; Arday resigned his post on 5 August and was found dead in his home on 14 August.

So, what is plagiarism?

A common definition is provided by the American Historical Association (AHA): it is “the appropriation of ‘the exact wording of another author without attribution’, and the borrowing of ‘distinctive and significant research findings or interpretations’”. Further, the AHA “considers plagiarism to be the failure to properly acknowledge the work of another, regardless of intent”.

Cofnas was not the first person to make the allegations against Jason Arday. The Times Higher Education had investigated the story for some time and elected not to publish an article “following correspondence with Arday’s solicitors”.

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), where Arday completed his PhD research, had investigated claims about his doctoral thesis. Yet, despite the presence of uncited verbatim material which was not presented in quotation marks, the investigation did not uphold the allegations of plagiarism. Given the definition above, how could this be?

The truth is that there is no single, agreed definition of plagiarism.

As noted, the AHA considers the act of reproducing material or ideas without proper acknowledgement of the source to be plagiarism, regardless of intent. However, if we look at other definitions, the waters begin to muddy.

The Collins Dictionary defines the word as “the practice of using or copying someone else’s idea or work and pretending that you thought of it or created it”. The Cambridge Dictionary definition is near identical – “the process or practice of using another person’s ideas or work and pretending that it is your own”. As is the Oxford English Dictionary’s – “the action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; literary theft”.

Each of these definitions includes some form of intent, the verb ‘pretend’, and verbal phrase ‘to pass off’ being critical caveats to the definition. This is because the word comes from, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “classical Latin plagium [for] kidnapping”. The first use of the word in the context of literary theft comes from the 1st Century AD Roman poet Martial’s Epigrams when he accused other poets of stealing his verses.

So, with this context in mind, plagiarism has been historically associated with theft; a deliberate act of misappropriation. Yet, for many writers, academics, and institutions, intent has become less important than the result. As the AHA legitimately points out, allowing for a definition of plagiarism that includes intent offers “easy absolution for sloppy work and convenient cover for plagiarists, since intent to deceive is often impossible to prove”.

This view, however, is not universally shared, and intent or lack thereof remains key for some. The Royal Society places plagiarism under the umbrella of “research misconduct” that “includes fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results”. Significantly, “research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion”.

Thus, both the exact way in which one interprets the word, and the intellectual environment where disputes are adjudicated, might alter the outcome of an alleged plagiarism offence, even if the fact that text or ideas have been lifted without proper attribution is undisputed.

Universities in the UK (and worldwide) have to grapple with the problem of academic misconduct and draw up rules and guidance for students and academics accordingly. LJMU’s Academic Misconduct Policy defines academic misconduct as “all deliberate attempt(s) to gain an unfair advantage in assessments. This includes cheating, plagiarism, unauthorised collusion, cheating in an examination or any other deliberate attempt to gain an unfair advantage in summatively assessed work”. Note the specific caveat that the conduct must be “deliberate”.

In the Arday case, the investigation cleared him of plagiarism. As reported in Byline Times, the university “inquiry found citation defects but did not uphold plagiarism, concluding that the problems were caused by ‘honest and reasonable error’, compounded by inadequate supervision regarding Arday’s learning disabilities”.

While other institutions may not consider intent when determining if plagiarism has been committed, as is their right, LJMU does. Academic conduct panels must adjudicate the evidence of the allegations before them, based on the rules and definitions of their institution.

This is why Jason Arday was cleared of committing plagiarism in his doctoral thesis: under the rules and regulations of his university, he did not.

Dr Chris Smith is a writer and historian

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A young person in their early teens today will, in all likelihood, live into the next century. They have already inherited a diminished environment, with a 73% decline in wildlife populations since 1970, according to the global environmental and conservation organisation WWF. In their lifetime, the world could get 2.5 to 3% warmer. Not surprisingly, globally nearly 85% of under 16s suffer moderate anxiety about the planet and 60% are very or extremely worried.

Nevertheless, Generation Alpha – the demographic cohort born between 2010 and 2025, and the largest generation ever, at two billion children – are likely to do more than any previous generation to come to the aid of the environment and tackle climate change.

No other generation has grown up with greater awareness and anxiety about the planet, but the early indications are that they will turn this eco-anxiety into positivity and action. Of course, there is no turning the clock back to pre-industrial climate-friendly times, but they are certainly not in denial, as so many older generations have been. After all, they have a bigger stake in the future.

Ironically, the best way to alleviate or cope with depression and anxiety according to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) is walking, preferably outdoors in nature. Equally, the best way to inspire action to save the planet is to experience and love it more. It is much easier to be in denial and feel disassociated from climate breakdown if you are insulated from the environment, seasons, wildlife and the wind on your face.

Although Generation Alpha is the first fully digitally native generation, there is evidence that it is much more discerning about digital usage and values real-world activities more.

Market research company GWI compared results from questionnaires of more than 30,000 8-15 year olds in 14 countries between 2021 and 2025 and found a significant increase in young people seeking real-world experiences such as preferring to watch a film in a cinema, visit their friends at weekends as well as to take trekking and walking holidays.

This is backed up by Natural England’s ‘The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England’, which finds an increasing connection between young people and nature. The number of young people who feel highly connected to nature has consistently increased from 44% in 2021 to 47% in 2022 to 52% currently. Interestingly it is even higher for Black/Black British ethnicities at 60% even though there is evidence that they have fewer opportunities to connect.

Behind these stats, there is an inspiring story of young people standing up for the planet.

Chris Packham, in his book, Nature is The Answer: A Toolkit for Eco-Positivity, not only agrees that nature is the best way to cope with eco-anxiety and provides a set of tools to do this, but also he celebrates young activists and naturalists who are inspiring a new generation. These include Anjali Sharma, who at 16 took Australian Government to court to defend water from pollution of fossil fuel extraction, Myra-Rose Craig aka ‘Birdgirl’, who at just seven years old was the youngest person in the world to identify 325 different types of British birds and at 17 the youngest to see half of the world’s bird species and Elizabeth Wanjiru Wathuti in Kenya, who after planting her first tree at the age of seven, set up the ‘Green Generation Initiative’ that has planted and grown more than six million trees.

Generation Alpha is less likely to use social media for the ‘climate doomism’ that has plagued Gen Z Instagram and TikTok. They tend to focus on curating a calmer and more positive world where they connect to nature. Gen Alpha tends to use social media more to record real life solutions than for status. They are very adept at using social media for activism but the trend to ban social media for under 16s is likely to make this more difficult. There have been amazing examples of very young digital influencers using social media for the good of the environment.

One of the youngest and most successful social media influencers, Mari Copeny, (@littlemissflint) who has more than 200,000 followers, started her digital activism at just eight years old, during the water crisis at her hometown of Flint in Michigan. She uses her social media following to campaign for clean water and for underprivileged children in Flint.

In the UK, Amy and Ella Meek were 11 and 9 years old respectively when they created ‘Kids Against Plastic’, launching award-winning educational campaigns showing how young people and schools could stop using single use plastic. They have since published two books for children, Be Plastic Clever and Be Climate Clever

Greta Thunberg was only 15 when she began her school climate strikes in 2018. A year later, she inspired 1.6 million schoolchildren from 125 countries to take part in the first Global Strike for Climate.

We should never underestimate the power of young people.

Stephen Colegrave is co-founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times

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

Listening to a recent Jason Stanley interview, he sounded like a sports announcer to the apocalypse.

“They’ve been taking over the military! They’ve been attacking the press! They’re toppling the universities! They’re using the courts to give draconian sentences to ICE protesters. They’re creating a private army. They’re doing everything! They’re doing all the things that if I were advising an authoritarian to do, if those were my values, I would advise. And so yes, they will try to use the military… but everyone’s got to stop them!”

The author of How Fascism Works was being interviewed about Yale University’s capitulation to the Trump regime over ‘ideological alignment’ but the above quote was in response to a question about the open escalation of threats against the US November midterm elections, the scope of which has not been sufficiently comprehended.

Stanley, a former Yale University professor of philosophy who left the US to work at the University of Toronto in Canada, pointed out what he called the “utterly obvious” fact that “Trump is not trying in any way to broaden his popular support.”

He said Trump’s “intention has always been to lock down power by bypassing elections.”

“I mean, it’s obvious! It’s been obvious. I’ve been writing about this for a year now. It’s just totally obvious. He’s not trying to broaden his popular support. So everyone has to realize they’re going to try to steal the elections!”

Whether or not they succeed is another matter, he said.

Stanley points out that Trump and his loyalists “are not very competent” but then adds: “There’s a much higher chance that whatever democracy we had is no longer existent on the federal level.”

Author Keir Giles reaches that same conclusion in his upcoming book, American Overthrow, where he documents the threats to the US midterms by looking both forward and backward.

As Giles reports:

“Election conspiracy theorists have been installed in key positions where they can influence both the conduct of elections and perceptions of their integrity. In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security appointed David Harvilicz, a campaigner to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to set policy on protecting election infrastructure. This includes ‘voting machines’, a category covering a wide range of systems in use for registering and counting votes in the United States.

“An ongoing campaign to cast doubt on the security of voting machines and the integrity of the results they report mirrors precisely the aims of Russian efforts during the 2016 and 2020 elections. These were not only directed at swinging voters behind Trump, but also sowing distrust in the US electoral system, including spreading hoax stories that voting machines were vulnerable to hacking.”

Big Lies

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.

The So-Called ‘Save Act’

Trump’s efforts to undermine the midterm elections are complemented by attempts to coerce Congress to pass the so-called Save Act, legislation that would likely further disenfranchise tens of millions of voters.

The Save Act requires voters to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. They would also need to provide photo identification from a specific short list of required documents for in-person voting. The legislation also curbs voting by mail and aims to force states to hand voter rolls to the federal government.

As Giles writes in American Overthrow, which focuses on the first 18 months of Trump’s second term and its grim resemblance to what happened in Russia at the turn of the century:

“The measures already taken in the United States can serve as preparation for a process familiar from authoritarian takeovers around the world: narratives about stolen or illegitimate elections, a declared emergency, additional executive powers to resolve it, and claims that only one leader can uphold legitimacy and restore order.

“In reality the only thing preventing Trump declaring he is entitled to continue as president past the nominal end of his second term is the text of the US Constitution, which… lacks an effective means of enforcement… The Russian-style, legalistic means of addressing the problem would be to amend the Constitution, as Putin did in 2021, to permit him to continue as president. The Trump-style method would be simply to ignore the Constitution altogether.”

Political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay told Byline Times: “There is no limit to what Trump will do to steal the election from American voters. The rule of law has broken down in the United States and Trump has gotten used to facing disorganized opposition from the courts to his countless illegalities.”

Like Giles, MacKay uses a Kremlinologist lens when analyzing Trump’s actions.

“Keep in mind that Trump is a Russian asset,” Mackay said. “Trump’s boss, Putin, recently had the Yabloko party barred from participating in upcoming elections. While it’s true elections in Russia have always been fraudulent - they’re merely affirmation exercises - Putin doesn’t want any outlet for the expression of anti-war sentiment.”

He added that “Trump has already cast Democrats as Communists and as ‘enemies of the people’” and “will use the excuse of national security to override state control of the conduct of national elections.”

“Trump will certainly not recognize any result that goes against him,” he said. “There is no effective constraint on Trump using organized government violence against the people. We’ve seen this with Trump turning ICE into an armed paramilitary force personally loyal to him and not to the US Constitution. Trump already uses ICE as a weapon against Americans who attempt to organize against his regime.”

Jason Stanley wants to see Americans collectively rally to their own defense.

“Everyone should figure out one thing that they can do to help the election,” he said. “One way they can bring their skillset to bear on helping the election and then devote themselves to that.”

And he wants people to remember that “authoritarians are always going to represent themselves as more confident than they are.”

He said defending the integrity of the midterm elections is going to require mass mobilization from “large pockets of resistance and pushback.”

“We are not dealing with a bunch of hyper-competent people here,” he said. “And we’re going to need Yale Law School to step up and provide lots of lawyers to defend against the charges that they’re going to bring across the country, against election officials, against people protecting the polls. We’re going to need essentially a mass mobilization of legal experts to defend the polls. We’re going to need police officers to enforce local laws and make sure that ICE is not doing things that violate the law. So whenever you have a paramilitary force like ICE that is working for an authoritarian leader, you’re going to need ordinary legal systems—the police, the lawyers, the judges to weigh in on the side of the law.”

Stanley admits “that’s problematic because… the police are obviously compromised in various ways in the United States”, but he says local police have to step up and “protect voters against what ICE may do. And everyone needs to make sure everyone’s registered to vote, gets out to the polls, that ICE does not intimidate voters from the polls, and that will require a community support of voters.”

“The main hope for Americans is that the Trump regime is incompetent and corrupt,” added Michael MacKay. “But they should not count on that. Citizens have to organize and unite and vote out the treason faction (the Republican Party) at every level. Votes may be stolen from them and fascism may prevail, but Americans have to fight every step of the way and never give up.”

The Real ‘Mail-In Fraud’

Trump, who has made restricting the ability to vote by mail a top priority of his administration, wrote in a 2025 post:

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS… We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED… Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM… I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX..MUST END NOW!!!!”

This August, Trump voted by mail.

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.